Colts Practice Squad Signings

[ChaosTheory]

Originally Posted by IndyNorm

First off where's that ranking coming from for 2022 b/c it's complete BS:

https://www.statmuse.com/nfl/ask/mos...d-2022-by-team

Where I think you're messing up is trying to use a single stat to indicate/imply overall performance. The Eagles O-line ranked 22nd in your link. But their O-line wasn't bottom-10, wasn't bottom-half, wasn't outside the top-10, wasn't even outside the top-5. They were widely considered the best O-line in the entire NFL.

Sacks in particular are a stat that has a ton of factors. You've cited 25 sacks when claiming our O-line didn't improve much after Pryor was benched. Look at the overall turmoil of the team at that time... Firing Reich, benching and unbenching Ryan, Ehlinger experiment, Saturday experiment, IR'ing and trading guys, Foles gets no playing time at all until week 16 and eats 7 sacks... the rest of that 8-game stretch was 2.5 sacks/game.

Just like with the Eagles' 22nd ranked O-line... the number is meaningless without context. The eyeball test shows you something different, not dissimilar to our DEF rankings vs. what we saw our D do with no aid from the O (in fact, our O directly made our D stats worse).

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As for the Ballard learning from his mistake argument... I just don't buy the premise. I don't buy that the better explanation for '22 was that Ballard "forgot" how to evaluate O-line. I can't thumb through history and say 2018-great, 2019-great, 2020-great, 2021-good, 2022-bad... and say, OK moral of this 5-year story is "bad", Ballard needs a complete change of mindset. That's nonsense.

Especially considering we haven't even seen the '23 product yet. How absurd is this current discussion going to seem if the '23 and beyond O-line gets back closer (even if not all the way) to the quality it had prior to '22? Then we'll be looking at one black sheep in the middle of an otherwise nice stretch.

To reference the Eagles again... for the past decade they've ranked Top-1, Top-3, Top-5, Top-10 every year... except that one year they ranked 17th... and that one other year they ranked 23rd... Largely with the same personnel. Point being, it happens.

Now, if the O-line shits the bed again for the second year in a row, ok, we've got something to talk about. But that hasn't happened yet. It could. But I think you're blowing your load too early.