Ladies and Gentlemen,
Let's face it, we stink.
Coming into the year, we had a decent team on paper, in a league with a great amount of parity. But the margin of error is very thin, we are well outside that margin
Originally Posted by: Martha Careful
I think we had a decent team on paper with us fans wrongly assuming the lines would be the strengths of the team, when in reality they're clearly the weaknesses of the team.
I think that's on us for horrible evaluating our linemen, both in terms of us as fans, but also Gute as he's sunken a lot of draft capital into lines and hasn't gotten much out of it this year.
And yes, there is Jenkins, but that was an inside job with Luke Getsy being his offensive coordinator in college. And yes there is Tom, but I was saying Tom could be the next Bakhtiari well before his draft and they selected Rhyan before Tom, so got lucky another team didn't grab Tom.
Gute's best first linemen selected that didn't have an inside source now on the Packers have been Runyan and Slaton, which are good values for where they were selected, but I think a strong case could be made that their best spots would be as backups.
So far, neither Runyan nor Slaton have ever finished a season with a PFF grade of 65.0 or higher, which is deemed average starter. Though Runyan got extremely close in 2021, and Slaton is pretty close this year, currently rankings as #32 highest graded DT with at least 203.5 snaps (50% of the guy with the most snaps).
Note: Wyatt is currently above 65.0, at 65.1... but he was a 1st round pick and only currently has 192 snaps, so he's getting more of a breather than Slaton or Clark and based on stats, I'd say Wyatt is strongly focusing on pass rush, best pass rush grade (BY FAR) but also worse run defense grade (sadly not by much).
Speaking of which, Slaton is at 236 snaps and Clark is at 296 snaps.
Slaton is the only one with a run defense grade of over 65.0. Wyatt, Wooden and Brooks might as well be pass rush specialist... it's just Slaton and Clark that might have a chance at stopping the run.