Ford: New day for Eagles offensive line
Offensive linemen are not, by nature, complainers. The role they chose on a football field or, more likely, the role that chose them is a sentence to a silent, grinding existence. It isn't fun, but, really, no one wants to hear it.
Offensive linemen are not, by nature, complainers. The role they chose on a football field or, more likely, the role that chose them is a sentence to a silent, grinding existence. It isn't fun, but, really, no one wants to hear it.
Lane Johnson, who grew up in the little crossroads town of Groveton, Texas, and graduated Groveton High School with 34 other classmates, doesn't expect playing tackle in the NFL to be easy. When your first job back home was digging graves for $8 an hour, you don't expect very much to be easy.
Still, the man played three years in the league, and the only coach he had known was Chip Kelly, a guy who could make digging graves seem like building sand castles.
"Trying to win games in April instead of September," Johnson said. "With Chip, our practices were pretty much the same, training camp style, from OTAs all the way through. So it wasn't a progression. We hit the ground running and stayed that way the whole year. Just speaking for myself, I got worn out toward the end."
Johnson is 6-foot-6 and somewhere around 315 pounds. He is 25, almost 26, and in the athletic prime of his life. Chip Kelly wore him out. Jason Peters, the left tackle opposite Johnson on the right side, is eight years older, and you can be sure the past three years didn't do him any favors, either.
"He rested his body this offseason," Johnson said. "He's looking good, coming back 100 percent."
That's good, because the draft strategy taken by the Eagles has ruled out selecting one of several tackles who will be available in the first round of the draft. Moving up to get a quarterback for the future, which is what Howie Roseman said the team has done by acquiring the No. 2 pick, doesn't help the offensive line of the present build a nest around lame duck incumbent Sam Bradford or whomever ends up as starting quarterback this season.
The team added a free agent at right guard in Brandon Brooks, supplanting Matt Tobin, and some center depth behind Jason Kelce with Stefen Wisniewski, but otherwise it is the same group that wasn't all that impressive last season. Johnson is optimistic that the problem wasn't the horse, but the jockey, particularly for tackles left on lonely islands in Kelly's scheme.
"We're going to have a lot more play action, more plays, different calls than what we did before, and I think it's better for the tackles," Johnson said. "The last couple of seasons we had zero chip pro [chip blocks from teammates to help in pass protection]. If you look at the tapes, Jason and I didn't have any chip pro from the tight ends or running backs. So, basically, it was all one-on-one."
Comparing Doug Pederson's blocking philosophies with those of Kelly is sketchy business, especially since, with the exception of four seasons with Calvary Baptist Academy in Shreveport, La., he's never been a head coach. Pederson also retained Jeff Stoutland, one of the few holdovers from Kelly's staff, a respected offensive line coach but one whose only pro experience in 33 years of coaching came under Kelly.
As a general rule, a West Coast hybrid out of the Mike Holmgren tree like the one that Andy Reid uses, and the kind that Pederson might be expected to employ, calls for more combination blocks and a fewer individual blocks. But nothing is that certain as April creeps toward May.
"I'm going in not expecting anything. My play comes down to how I do, and that's how I look at it," Kelce said. "I didn't play well enough at times last year. They asked me to do a lot, but I also get paid a lot. I have expectations to do my job better than most centers in the league, so I don't really analyze whether other centers had to block up one-on-one. From personnel, to schemes, to defenses, a lot of different things culminate in a guy playing well or not playing well. To try to assess all that is dangerous."
After a few days of practice, there are some changes, however. The pace is slower. Teaching is done on the field. The music is gone. Pederson mixes comfortably with the players.
"His playing experience means he knows what we go through," said backup quarterback Chase Daniel, who spent the last three years under offensive coordinator Pederson in Kansas City. "Some coaches think they know, but they don't have a good grasp of how hard and how far to push guys and when to back off and give guys a bone. Doug's very smart that way."
On the offensive line, a man learns to be pragmatic and deal with whatever comes along. When Johnson was leaving home to travel to the OTAs, the rising waters of the Trinity River got in his way.
"There were cars under water, so we decided to turn back," he said.
If you wait long enough, however, any tide will recede and maybe things can get back to normal. That goes for football, too.
"Now, this is just a regular pro-style offense. It's the first time I've played that since high school, really," said Johnson, who operated in a spread attack at Oklahoma. "[The last three years] were an experience for me. Obviously, I had to do my job, but go watch how Jason and I went one-on-one. It's a lot different than regular offenses. We'll see how they handle that in San Francisco."
He's not complaining, mind you. It beat digging graves, and it turned out to be a flood that didn't last forever. Doug Pederson arrived, and the landscape looks normal again. It's very hard to find anyone in the locker room complaining about that.
@bobfordsports