When in doubt, go back to the
All I know is that when I watched us run the football during 20 game regular and post season play - my perception was one of watching our backs "run to darkness" a higher percentage of the time than RB's on other teams and conversely, I saw other teams' RB's run through gaping holes to daylight more frequently than did our RB's.
I'll concede that perhaps my perceptions are faulty and colored by subjectivity, but that's what I saw and I'm sticking to my story.
Stats or no stats, our run blocking was at best "average" and at times somewhat less than that.
I agree here. Our offensive line was just "ok" last season, and the reason for that was lack of injuries for the first time in many seasons our line got to play together for many consecutive games to learn each others style of play.
Our RBs rarely ran through huge holes as I've seen from other teams OLines. Our OL would've faired far worse if our QB wasn't playing out of his mind last year, with quick reads and releases, our WR(s) playing out of his mind(s) getting open and the ability to just chuck it on up any given play.
Last season Gandy played very well imho, Wells is growing on me, but he still doesn't get enough push on running plays, Deuce is lazy and doesn't give full effort on every play(if he did, he'd be GOOD!), Levi is still young, but strong and his future looks bright imo. Don't get me started on Sendlein, he's been overachieving since day 1 and he gets washed by DTs regularly, then our RBs have to adjust their angles almost immediately to avoid the clutter in the middle, making most of our inside running plays, outside running plays.
I appreciate Send coming in and playing well for us after our cluster* at center for the past few years, but it's obvious an upgrade is needed there and at guard. Our OL mentality shifting from pass first to run first, is what I am waiting for and can't wait til it happens, it may not come soon as we have the best WR in the world on our team and he's very young, and we will continue to feed him I am sure.
Our O-Line is adequate, meaning they do well at what they do pass blocking, cuz that's what we do alot of. But they lack the ability to take control of a game as alot of other NFL teams that do have the ability to run the ball and get multiple first downs. Hopefully that changes this season, but I thought we should've gotten atleast 1 FA OL signee to start at Center/Guard.