Mile High Report
If I ask you which QBs had the 10 best seasons 2016-2025, you will get a lot of consensus. This is also true for RBs, WRs and TEs, because most fans tend to pay attention to the stats that these ball carriers put up. Unfortunately, it is much harder for the rest of the players on the offense, i.e. the offensive line.
SISdatahub.com has ten seasons worth of individual performance data for offensive linemen which I have now compiled/scrubbed into my own spreadsheet. I did this for both passing snaps and running snaps which they split out.
To review these are starters (min 250 pass blocking snaps).
For the best individual performances, you have to split out the centers since they give up significantly fewer sacks than guards and tackles. In terms of blown block percentage for starters, there are only two non-centers in the top 10. For sack percentage allowed, there are only centers in the top 10.
Terron Armstead was absolutely elite when he was in his prime. He is the model of what Sean Payton likes in his tackles: light, quick, strong and smart. TJ Lang was a surprise since he was good, but never great (2x Pro Bowl). The best PBB performance by a Bronco was Matt Paradis in 2018 who had one on 297 pass blocks (0.34%). That’s 15th best. Luke Wattenberg’s 2024 season is the next best Bronco – 0.62% – and that is 64th.
Looking at guards and tackles other than Armstead and Lang, we get the table below.
The immediate thing that jumped out to me was how the last one of these was in 2021. It’s either getting harder to pass block in the NFL, or the current generation of starters is not as good as these players, many of whom have retired. Kevin Dotson and Joe Thuney are the only ones still playing. Thuney is elite. Dotson has never received much credit for his performance as he has never ever been named to the (joke now called) Pro Bowl. This is a result of Dotson never playing as well in a season as he did 2021 which was his second NFL season (with the Steelers at that point).
In terms of sack rate, well have to parse this differently since so many centers have had full seasons without allowing a sack (76 instances, plenty of guys did it more than once). The other four OL spots have 73 total, despite being four positions instead of one – meaning that it’s about four times easier to go a full season as a starting center without giving up a sack relative to the other OL positions.
So here are the best center seasons, all allowed zero sacks; they are sorted by lowest blown pass block % and also holding percentage. The most recent was Corey Linsley for the Chargers in 2022. Matt Paradis in 2018 is the best Bronco center season. He didn’t allow a sack that season in...
