DutchBird
Well-Known Member
It's apparently surprising to our front office brain trust, but when your former Pro Bowl LT gets into his mid 30s, it's pretty predictable that before long his performance will take a drop.
Yup...
but what could/would you have done to fix it?
We had massive holes in secondary, which needed to be fixed. LB's looked shaky. O-line was a problem. When Maclin walked, WR became an issue. Not sure about last year, but general agreement among the pundits is that in the draft, basically all linemen they graded in those rounds were gone - picked right in front of them. We might have reached for an O-lineman, but we all know how that worked out the last time it happened (Danny Watkins).
In free agency there was nothing, unless you wanted to overspend even more on an O-lineman than we did on Maxwell. At the same time, the O-linemen that were there looked servicable, based on last season.
The sole argument you can make where they were completely wrong would be Mathis. Thing is, Mathis (or rather Rosenhaus) played himself out of a job. It became a game of chicken, that ended up with both teams being the loser.
I do not remember exactly how the 2014 draft went as far as O-line goes.