Field Gulls
Choose one candidate on offense and one on defense!
We had a pretty cool question brought up on Monday’s live stream episode of the HawksZone Rundown podcast. Myself and Ryan MacMillan predominantly focused on training camp previews but during the Viewer Q&A, Brendan Myers submitted this in the chat:
Which player do you expect to be most improved from last year on each side of the ball?
I hadn’t really thought about it much and at the time, I looked at the offensive line and eyed one of Olu Oluwatimi, Jalen Sundell, or Christian Haynes to make that step up. Obviously I left out Anthony Bradford, who could also be most improved if things click for him in year three, but I might as well include him after the fact. Oluwatimi was my top candidate on the expectation that he will start at center, followed by Haynes and then Sundell.
Defensively? I picked the borderline cop-out answer of Byron Murphy II, who had a solid rookie season but didn’t have the raw stats to back it up. My hope is that with an improved defensive line, Murphy will be able to line up in different spots in the trenches and be a more disruptive player in year two.
Ryan went with veterans like Riq Woolen and Uchenna Nwosu as possible candidates on defense. They’ve both had quality seasons before but we are focusing just on leaps from the previous season. It was a harder call on offense looking at Sundell, Kenneth Walker III, and Zach Charbonnet among others.
A final shoutout to Brendan, who answered his own question with A.J. Barner and Tyrice Knight, a pair of rookies who perhaps saw much more playing time than anticipated and performed well when tasked with more responsibility.
This is a fun open-ended discussion and I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts in the comments, so head on down to the bottom of this page!
You can watch the whole episode of the HawksZone Rundown below, but I’ve also timestamped the video to go to 40:47 for our take on Brendan’s question.
Head to the comments section to leave your answer and join the conversation! You can sign up for a commenting account here and we have full-time moderators to enforce the Community Guidelines.
