Behold the behemoths up front. The mountainous men who determine the success of every play on a football field — but mostly go unnoticed.
Until the replay, and the offensive lineman is highlighted giving up a sack, something your Detroit Lions didn’t do often a year ago. In fact, only Tampa Bay gave up fewer, and if you were wondering why the expectation and anticipation feel different around this franchise, different even from the occasional playoff team during the last 15 years, the offensive side of the line of scrimmage is the place to start.
None of those teams had a line like this one does. You’d have to go back to the early 1990s to find a similarly promising group, when Lomas Brown and Kevin Glover anchored a solid unit with their Pro Bowl talents and a couple of promising youngsters flanked them.
That line, though, never got to evolve as some thought it might. Tragedy gutted it. Mike Utley was lost to a terrible accident on the field that paralyzed him and Eric Andolsek was killed in his front yard in Louisiana when a semi-truck ran off the road and struck him.
‘HE’S A MAN ON A MISSION’: The rising star of Lions OT Penei Sewell
Before those tragedies, the group helped propel the Lions to a 12-4 record and a berth in the NFC title game. The offensive line was never the same, understandably. And hasn’t had so much promise until now.
Offensive lines are the foundation, obviously. Build a good one and you’ve got something that lasts, that can offer stability when the pieces around it changes.
The Lions should again have one of the best units in football this fall. Pro Football Focus ranks it fifth heading into the season. It could be even better if everyone remains relatively healthy.
Last season’s offensive line performed well despite health issues, though the projected unit coming out of training camp never played a single snap together when Halapoulivaati Vaitai went down with a back injury just before the opener.
Vaitai is back, no pun intended, though he missed a workout last week. The Lions will be cautious with their guard through the rest of training camp. He is splitting time with the first unit with Graham Glasgow, who was signed as insurance this offseason.
For the moment, however, the core of the line should be set. That’s a tantalizing thought for Dan Campbell and Ben Johnson, who is able to call plays the way he does in part because of the reliably punishing front five of the offense.
How much more punishing the unit becomes will help determine the success of the offense this season. Taylor Decker can’t wait to see it unfold.
Then again, he’s been waiting a while, as he said last week:
“For me, having been here (a while), every season it’s like, ‘oh, look at the projected line here.’ It’s never happened. So that’s … I just want to get through day to day, (and) let’s come out healthy. It’d be awesome to get to Week 1 and get to our projected starters.”
But?
“Ultimately, the potential on paper, as with the entire team … it doesn’t mean anything.”
Yet it could mean everything.
Clearly, the expectation Decker and the rest of his teammates are feeling this summer has to do with many factors. Chief among them Brad Holmes and Campbell. They, after all, shaped this line and continue to develop it.
Johnson, the offensive coordinator, isn’t far behind either if we’re ranking the reasons the anticipation is so strong. And Jared Goff isn’t far behind him.
Let’s just say none of them are here, on the precipice of the season, favorites to win the division for the first time in decades, without the contributions of the other. On the field, though, it starts and stops with the line.
If Decker and Vaitai or Graham and Frank Ragnow and Jonah Jackson and Penei Sewell don’t open holes for David Montgomery and Jahmyr Gibbs, then Montgomery’s toughness and Gibbs’ speed won’t matter. And if the big fellas up front don’t give Goff time in the pocket, then it wouldn’t matter if Patrick Mahomes were the quarterback taking snaps.
Speaking of Mahomes, he played behind one of the best offensive lines in the NFL last season. Kansas City is expected to be just as good there this season.
If you’re curious, and you should be, Pro Football Focus projects the Chiefs as the fourth-best unit heading into the season. Want to know who PFF thinks is the best?
The Eagles, who played in last season’s Super Bowl … against Kansas City, in case you’ve forgotten, which I’m guessing you have not. Philadelphia, like Kansas City, is also led by one of the best QBs in the league in Jalen Hurts.
And while Goff is neither Hurts nor Mahomes in arm strength or mobility, his stellar play in the back half of last year is because he shared a similar privilege: playing behind some of the best blockers in the business.
That’s by design, of course, and why Holmes and Campbell’s first draft pick was used to take a player they thought might anchor the most critical space on any football field. Sewell rewarded their belief with a Pro Bowl effort last season, his second, a performance that brings a chuckle to Lomas Brown.
“I thought I was athletic when I played,” he said last week, shaking his head. “But this guy? Man …”
Brown sees the makings of the franchise’s finest offensive line in decades, an athletic collection that should be the centerpiece of one of the better offenses in football.
“I mean we have a great room,” said Decker, “our chemistry is amazing.”
The talent and chemistry in the room could make it the best room in the NFL, and surely the best room within the Lions. The room will need health to make it so.
The room has got everything else.
Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @shawnwindsor.