With the NFL Draft set to kick off in just over a week, I asked The Athletic’s Dane Brugler, one of the premier draft analysts in the business and someone I regularly discuss prospects with, to join me on a podcast. As Dane said in the opening of this podcast, this sort of conversation is one we’ve had almost daily on various prospects and evaluation methods, so it was mostly us peeling back the curtain for everyone else.
Chances are if you are reading this you have heard of Brugler’s tremendous draft guide “The Beast,” but you may not know how highly I regard his eye for evaluating the offensive line. I started reading his work several years ago and was impressed with how detailed yet succinct and accurate he was with identifying what linemen did well in his scouting reports. Since then, we have developed an awesome relationship where we can exchange ideas and share and compare notes.
I wanted to kick off this discussion by talking about Iowa center Tyler Linderbaum, who is the most interesting valuation in the class for a variety of different reasons to me. We dug deep into our personal evaluations of Linderbaum, how we project him, where we see his value being highest and other pertinent layers of what seems to be one of the most polarizing players in the class.
From there we branched off in a few different directions before getting to an exercise I dubbed ‘Building an O-line” where we alternated picking one lineman from round 1, two from rounds 2-3, and four from rounds 4-7 and the UDFA pool to give us a starting five with a key backup.
Here are some additional topics we covered:
How much should age factor into an evaluation of a player and how do we each view that question?
Why it is important to not let past misses cloud our perception of current players, specifically when there are some surface-level similarities. Two examples are Linderbaum/Garrett Bradbury and Charles Cross/Andre Dillard.
Dane gives me several of his favorite day two and three targets from the O-line class and we each give an overview of how we view those players.
Why both Dane and I like Cole Strange, where we differ on his outlook and specific insight I was able to obtain during my film room with Strange earlier in the week.
Why UTSA OL Spencer Burford is one of my favorite day three prospects in the class.
A couple prospects we are most heavily split on and why.
When we built our O-line’s, what factors were most important to us and why?
Look out for another podcast dropping later this week for subscribers only; my second and final pre-draft podcast with Duke Manyweather. If you missed our first discussion, we covered well over a dozen prospects in this class here. We will dive deeper into some day two and three prospects on this next podcast, revisit the Linderbaum discussion, conduct our own 'Build the O-line’ experiment, and cover many other topics.
Trench Warfare Podcast: OL evaluation, Tyler Linderbaum, favorite mid-round players and building an O-line unit from 2022 prospects with the Athletic's Dane Brugler