Seahawks OL: Where do they rank in Trench Warfare metrics?

Where does Seahawks OL rank around the NFL in these key categories? Seaside Joe 1968

Brandon Thorn has become the go-to authority on offensive line analysis for websites like The Athletic because of his “Trench Warfare” brand on Substack and YouTube. That’s a good thing because most of us usually do not fix our attention on the offensive line during games unless they’re doing poorly and do not understand how to adequately judge their performances; and that’s whether it’s in a vacuum or especially when we need to compare them to other offensive lines around the NFL.

As in, I can watch Damien Lewis play football and come up with a guess for how good he is, but that assessment is worthless without knowing what the average left guard is like around the rest of the league. We didn’t really know how good Lewis has been relative to other guards until he became a free agent and signed with the Carolina Panthers. We now know that Lewis is set to be the seventh-highest paid left guard in the NFL based on average annual salary, although that doesn’t necessarily make Lewis the seventh-best left guard.

There are also the left guards who have not been paid on a veteran contract yet, as well as those who signed deals just before he did, and players who might not be categorized as left guards today but could be by the end of the season. Lewis might be the 7th-best left guard in the NFL or the 15th-best left guard in the NFL, but all we really know is that the Panthers valued him at $13.25 million per season and that’s more than enough to think that he’s been graded as a “starting guard worth having” to at least one team.

And that’s all a player really needs. One team.

In order to try and sift through the noise to find answers about offensive line adequacy that you can trust, some people put all of their eggs into one basket (PFF) and just assume that the graders for that website are qualified enough to be an authority on Damien Lewis compared to Laken Tomlinson compared to Quenton Nelson. If you can trust that: “Here’s a number between 0-99 and no context. Good luck.”

The anti-PFF point is a valuable one, but not the argument I’m even attempting to make today. Instead, I’m just highlighting that there are other avenues besides PFF that can try and help guide us towards better understanding the value of every offensive line and offensive linemen around the NFL, and if we’re lucky, sometimes the focus will be on the Seahawks offensive linemen because we defintely care more about those particular players here at Seaside Joe than any others in the league.

So I signed up for Brandon Thorn’s Trench Warfare substack to gain additional intel based on his recent article titled “The 2024 OL Almanac”. The cost? $8 per month or $85 per year to gain access to a newsletter that is over 90% podcast episodes (a little antithetical to the point of being a newsletter in my opinion) and hasn’t posted any article to read since a short assessment of the first round of the draft on April 26th. So it has been three months in between articles.

Seaside Joe: $5 per month or $55 per year

Frequency of articles: Every day

Frequency of bonus articles: 2-3 times per week

Streak: 1,968 days in a row (started March 3, 2019)

Where to find anything else like Seaside Joe: Nowhere

Is it harder to write or post frequently about the offensive line than it is to have a daily Seahawks newsletter? I don’t know about that. There are a hell of a lot more offensive linemen in the NFL than there are Seahawks in the NFL. More offensive line coaches, and probably even more fans who are interested in the offensive line because as I said earlier, few of us (including me) really understand it and we would LOVE to know more.

Offensive line articles are as popular at Seaside Joe as any other topic, so I will encourage Trench Warfare to post more frequently or for copycats and other alternatives to PFF to continue to crawl out of the woodwork to teach us what we want to know but can’t easily find.

What you really want to know: What Trench Warfare had to say about the Seahawks OL

Here are some takeaways from Brandon’s 2024 OL Almanac and where the Seahawks ranked in some key categories going into training camp:

Experience level rank: 21st

Combined age: 9th-youngest

Draft capital spent: t-16th

Average weight: t-13th heaviest

Average athleticism*: 9th-highest

*Brandon Thorn is using RAS (Relative Athleticism Score) which in addition to having some critics, is also not fully completed on every player in the NFL. So we can’t quite say for sure where Seattle’s OL ranks athletically, although being 9th implies that maybe the Seahawks are attempting to be an athletic OL. This would make sense based on Ryan Grubb and Scott Huff’s OL unit for the Washington Huskies. Something I posted about way back in February.

These categories are all free for anyone to read, so I’m not giving away any trade secrets here.

What we can sort of learn from these rankings though is that the Seahawks offensive line, in terms of certain categories that actually have NOTHING to do with quality, is at least not living on the fringes as we enter camp. They’re not the heaviest, the fastest, the youngest, the oldest, the slowest…I think the Seahawks are merely trying to find five starters who will work well together, will hit their marks successfully as run blockers, and give Geno Smith more time to throw. And the current average of those five projected starters (at least on Thorn’s list, which we don’t know which five players he picked for Seattle)—which could change because we don’t even know who won the position battles yet—comes out to something around the middle of the league in most cases.

This is in pretty stark contrast to a team like the Rams, as L.A. ranked 31st in athleticism and third in weight. The Rams have added several of the heaviest interior offensive linemen in the NFL over the past 18 months: C Steve Avila, G Kevin Dotson, G Jonah Jackson.

Meanwhile, the Seahawks parted with Lewis, a player listed at 327, and drafted Christian Haynes, a player who weighed 317 at the combine. Evan Brown is listed at 320 and he could be replaced at center by Olu Oluwatimi, a player who weighed 307 at the combine. It would seem as though Seattle wants to be lighter and more athletic, although checking in on player weights is really only useful if you know what they weigh every week during the season—we have no idea how Lewis vs. Haynes or Laken vs. Lewis or Brown vs. Oluwatimi will actually compare on Sundays.

But the premise of the Seahawks being lighter and more athletic on the offensive line is a fair one given what we know about Grubb and Huff’s time on the Huskies and what they want their OL to be able to do on the field. There’s going to be a lot of movement, a lot of pulling, a lot of needing to get to the second level as blockers, and it seems as though Seattle’s gameplan will differ significantly from L.A.’s.

The Seahawks weighted RAS score, which again is not going to be entirely accurate anyway, was sixth-best in the NFL. So even a little bit higher when adjusted for weight.

Because it is only a small percentage of information (1 out of 32 teams) that is behind the paywall and promoting Trench Warfare to thousands of NFL fans, I’ll add that Thorn named Christian Haynes as already being Seattle’s “strongest and most powerful” offensive lineman. This is before Haynes has even won a job on the offensive line. We know from Saturday’s post that Brett Kollman and E.J. Snyder were also going crazy for Haynes and his ceiling as a mauling run blocking guard for years to come.

And paywall or no, it’s easily-available information to share that the Seahawks have the cheapest (lowest 2024 cap hit) offensive line unit in the NFL in 2024. I know I’ve written about it before. Charles Cross, Abe Lucas, Haynes, Olu are all on their rookie contracts, as are Anthony Bradford, McClendon Curtis, while Tomlinson is at the stage of his career where he won’t be getting big deals anymore.

There wasn’t much else to share from that post and unfortunately we didn’t gain much insight on how good Thorn thinks the Seahawks offensive line will be in 2024, but hopefully that changes after a few games are played. That kind of information would be worth more than $8 per month, to many of us it would be priceless.

As opposed to what we know about Seattle’s current offensive line, which is that so far it’s only costless.