Fully agreed. The easiest way to ruin a young QB is to let him get the shit beat out of him on a weekly basis due to a shitty OL. You would think Ballard would want to make damn sure that isn't going to happen to AR, even if he had to let got of some of that cap space he loves to hoard over like Smaug. But he didn't, so now we have to just keep our fingers crossed and hope both the current OL gets better and also stays healthy.

There is no quick fix for this. Every team is having issues. Every fanbase is complaining about it. I must see five tweets a day about team ______ why don't they sign Dalton Risener etc etc. If he was the answer he would be signed by now. Oline quality and depth is a league wide problem right now because teams are not developing players like they used to. One factor of that is the current CBA which limits practice time. Reggie was just talking about it on one of the morning shows. About how he has to limit reps for guys and the starters end up taking them all be there is not enough to go around. When he played everyone got reps, that is he Manning and Harrison built such great chemistry. Guys need reps to develop, especially oline who need to build chemistry. If you were going to sign a guy it would have been back in FA start. Now you see the league going towards athletic QBs who can improvise when a play breaks down, bc they are constantly breaking down.

Also AR will be holding the ball longer than usual, he has been doing it in 7-on-7 work all camp. He holds the ball long because he is still learning to process what he is seeing. That means the pass rush will get to him a lot. No oline will be able to pass block for a super long time. It's not possible. So we will see a lot of pass rush get by and get to him until he learns to get the ball out quickly. One of his pluses though is he has a good feel for the pass rush, something that showed up a lot in his college tape as opposed to someone like Levis who has a bad feel for the rush.

At least you named names. I do not think Risner is an actual option. He is likely the same player as Fries, but wants paid much better than where he is today. This is why he is still available. No teams are interested in paying him what he is asking, because his best days are behind him.

As to the draft pick, I could see that argument. We have a pretty good amount of rotational players in the front 7, so that pick was kind of a luxury pick. I don't recall who was picked at G after him. It would be interesting to know if they turn out to be any good in the NFL.

Yeah, there is a reason that the Broncos moved on from Risner and picked Powers to replace him.

Just like there is a reason he's still available. He either is not very good or doesn't want to play.

I heard somewhere that he was liking Twitter posts from fans about him coming to their team (Colts and Vikings at least).

Seems like he does want to play. So it must be some combination of performance + age + price.

i think granson is a good candidate to have a breakout year

Maybe Risner isn't the answer, but doing next to nothing in the offseason and just hoping what we have gets better definitely isn't the answer either.

Don't follow your AR comment. If he's going to be holding the ball longer then why wouldn't you want to improve the OL to give him more time?

Just boggles my mind that out of 12 draft picks we only came away with 1 player to help out the OL.

I agree.

I think having a mobile QB like Richardson will help them out. We all know the statue we put back there last year was a big part of the problem. Also, the fact that his arm could not hold up for more than one game made it obvious we had no real deep passing abilities.
But I agree with you.