Windy City Gridiron
Chicago Bears’ General Manager Ryan Poles and Assistant General Manager Ian Cunningham, both former offensive linemen, came on the job promising to fix the offensive line. While many believed that would happen quickly, their efforts to turn over the offensive line took a bit longer than initially intended.
I’m going to start you out with a chart and work backwards to explain it all. As you take your first look, I’ve charted each of the five starting offensive line positions left to right (left tackle, left guard, center, right guard, right tackle), then swing tackle (ST), swing interior offensive lineman (SiOL), and “Other.” The other spot is a summation of essentially OL8 or deeper as the roster was initially intended going into the season. Each bar indicates the percentage of snaps played by that person, who I will define below, over the course of the year. Important to note that if the intended starter at, say, left guard played snaps at center or right guard, those snaps do count for this exercise.
Wait, how can 2024 have “other” over 100%? Well, that’s because they relied on multiple players deeper than the initial seven positions to get through the season. Here’s how each season worked out.
2022: Entering 2022, Ryan Poles was looking to shed contracts inherited from the Ryan Pace era and reset this group. He drafted Braxton Jones with a 5th round pick, who played every snap at LT. He inherited Cody Whitehair and Teven Jenkins to play the guards, signed Lucas Patrick to play center, and signed Riley Reiff in the summer to play right tackle. The starting combination of Jones-Whitehair-Patrick-Jenkins-Reiff never saw the field as Patrick and Reiff started the year hurt. Patrick couldn’t snap and shared reps with Jenkins at guard until he came back in game 7 before getting hurt 10 plays into the game, giving way to Sam Mustipher, who played a remarkable 98.7% of the snaps. Mustipher is given the SiOL label here. Larry Borom projected as the swing tackle and made seven starts at RT, one at LG, one at RG, and replaced Reiff in another. The “Other” offensive linemen in 2022 are led by Michael Schofield, who made two starts at left guard and three starts at right guard.
In all, the Bears used nine different starting combinations. The most starts together as a unit shook out to Jones-Whitehair-Mustipher-Jenkins-Reiff, which is 80% of the way there, with five total starts. While this was a disaster, the five starts by Schofield are the only starts outside of the top seven offensive linemen. You could absolutely argue that Schofield was the top iOL backup as he started next to Patrick in his one start at center, filling in for Cody Whitehair. It really comes down to Lucas Patrick not being able to stay on the field.
If we grade the starting combinations by number of forecasted starting offensive linemen in the lineup, the Bears sent out all five zero times, four starters five...
