Are you freaking out about Miami’s offensive line yet? Because I might be. The success of the 2023 season is so dependent on Tua playing at least 16 games that not addressing the offensive line depth is sabotaging that.
The Dolphins are practicing in Houston this week in preparation for their second preseason game against the Houston Texans. Thursday morning, during the first play of the 11-on-11 team period, Miami’s all-world left tackle Terron Armstead “got landed on,” and he was eventually carted off the field after walking gingerly to the trainer’s table.
The news Thursday night that the injury was nothing serious and the “mindset is on week 1.”
I know that the 2023 football season flashed right before your eyes when you heard Armstead got hurt. And the ending to that flash season wasn’t any good without Armstead.
Terron Armstead is NOT going to play every game this season.
He’s just not.
He has not been able to stay healthy for a full season in a very long time, well, actually, ever since entering the league in 2013. And we saw how much better the Dolphins’ offense is when Armstead is in the game.
So why is Chris Grier so hard-headed about adding another offensive lineman?
The division rival NY Jets are certainly worried about their offensive line situation. Head Coach Robert Saleh was seen on HBO’s “Hard Knocks” embarrassing his offensive line in front of the entire team, saying,
“It doesn’t matter if you have a Hall of Fame quarterback, two 10 million dollar receivers…none of it matters until the big boys up front change who the fuck we are!”
Aaron Rodgers is now sending subliminal signals for the Jets to go and get his long-time friend and teammate LT David Bakhtiari from the Green Bay Packers.
The point is, your rivals are not playing around Grier. Protect the quarterback!
We have all seen the stats about how different the offense was when Armstead was out, how the line gave up a lot more pressures than they did when he was in. Well, they are not telling the whole story, and what they leave out is really interesting.
First off Terron Armstead missed all of four games and only played 8 snaps in a 5th. It just happens that the 8 play game was against the Jets, and three of the games he missed were the Jets, Patriots (in NE) and the 49ers. Those are three of the best defensive teams in football. It is also worth noting that only one of the games Armstead missed was a game that Tua played in. So a big part of the increased pressure rate when Armstead was out was because Bridgewater (2.7 seconds) and Thompson (2.6 seconds) took substantially more time than Tua (2.3 seconds) to get rid of the ball.
Of course, there was a big difference with Tua. Tua was sacked 3 times by the 49ers and, incredibly, 4 times by the Texans after Armstead left the game. So 7 of Tua’s 21 sacks came in the one game and 3 drives he played without Armstead. But, again, not like that was all Armstead. When I looked back at the Texans game, it was LG Robert Jones giving up the sacks, though Brandon Shell wasn’t getting the job done at LT either.
If the offense is missing Armstead, it will notice it a lot more if Tua is also out. But while everyone seems to want to cry that the sky is falling and ask why Grier didn’t do anything to fix the line, I will say he did. Lamm and Wynn look like better backups than they had last season (Lamm was a backup last season and played well in the half game he played before getting hurt. But don’t overlook switching from Bridgewater to White as the primary backup at QB. While Bridgewater averaged 2.7 seconds of pocket time in 2022, Mike White averaged 2.3 seconds. Just like Tua. That will also help with the pressure.