The debate was intense this spring.  The Cincinnati Bengals desperately needed to help young quarterback Joe Burrow, and there were likely going to be two outstanding offensive prospects available for Cincinnati.  But those players would help the offense in drastically different ways.

One option was to draft Burrow’s former teammate, LSU WR Ja’Marr Chase. The other was to draft Oregon OT Penei Sewell, which would help the offense in a very different way.  Many chimed in on the debate, and the most interesting part of the analysis was the value placed on each position.  Few debated whether Chase or Sewell were elite prospects; both were blue chip players at their position in college, and little of the argument centered on how they compared to others at the same position.  Rather, the question could be boiled down to this: was adding a great WR prospect better or worse than adding a great OT prospect?

On a pass play, the wide receivers are attackers and the offensive linemen are mitigators. Grouping players into attackers and mitigators can be a helpful way to analyze what each position brings to the game.  An elite attacker is always valuable, although his value might be limited if he’s lined up against a great mitigator.  But a mitigator is only as valuable as the person he’s trying to mitigate and the other mitigators on his team. This is easiest to think about when it comes to cornerbacks.  Nnamdi Asomugha was a shutdown, Hall of Fame level cornerback for three years in Oakland at a time when the Raiders pass defense was below average. Asomugha was targeted to an absurdly low degree, and while teams were forced to throw away from him, that didn’t matter much because the other mitigators were below average.

A more striking example was when Darrelle Revis — in his prime — was rendered near useless against the Jets top rival.  Revis could shut down the top  outside wide receivers in football, an especially valuable stkill…. except when the Jets faced New England.  When the Patriots top targets were Wes Welker, Rob Gronkowski, and Aaron Hernandez, the Jets wound up “wasting” Revis on  Deion Branch.  Against many teams, Revis would be really valuable, but against New England, his mitigation skills were not necessary because he was stuck against the team’s fourth weapon.

This same analysis holds for offensive linemen on passing plays, as they essentially act like cornerbacks. No matter how dominant Jonathon Ogden and Joe Thomas were in their prime, when the passing weapons on their teams were bad, their offenses were bad. Nine years ago, I wrote that spending a very early first round pick on a left tackle was a luxury that bad teams could not afford.  I stand by that analysis today, but I want to use some examples to illustrate the point.

When the Bengals are deciding between drafting an elite left tackle prospect or an elite wide receiver prospect, how do they come to an answer? One way is to think about what happens based on the player that prospect will be up against: the opposing team’s defensive end or cornerback.  Let’s simplify things a little bit and assume that NFL defenses have either bad players or good players, and that they are in equal proportion.  In that case, there are four different types of teams Cincinnati could face when it comes to the right defensive end and the number one cornerback on the opposite team.

Let’s walk through the examples.  We will assume that the rookie LT or WR prospect (in this case, Sewell or Chase) will turn out to be a great player, and that the position that they don’t take will be filled by a bad player.  So if the Bengals draft Sewell, they will have a bad WR, and if they draft Chase, they will have a bad LT.

Bad Right Defensive End, Bad #1 Cornerback

If Cincinnati faces this team, you would clearly prefer having WR Chase over LT Sewell.   Having a great LT against a bad RDE is a waste of resources; your great LT is not adding a lot of value, and you are stuck with a bad wide receiver trying to get open against a bad number one corner.  But if you had a great wide receiver, he should be able to have a huge game against a bad number one cornerback.  Yes, your quarterback might ^[1]And might is the key word here: having a wide receiver get open quickly is a very good way to minimize the number of pressures your quarterback facses. face a couple more pressures during the game, but that would easily be offset by the hundred yard game you would project Chase to produce.

Bad Right Defensive End, Good #1 Cornerback

This one is just a little bit trickier, but I would say we would still slightly prefer Chase over Sewell.  In this situation, you might wind up throwing pretty frequently to your number two and number three wide receivers, and challenging that top cornerback less often.  But (1) having Chase means your number two and number three wide receivers are better (since they used to be your number one and number two wide receivers, and (2) you still don’t get much of a value from having Sewell.   The number of offensive snaps where a bad RDE is going to make a play is going to be limited to that small subset of plays where (1) the RDE wouldn’t get by Sewell, but would get by a bad RDE, (2) the bad RDE gets to the quarterback before anyone else, and (3) the play takes long enough to develop for the bad RDE to get to the quarterback. Meanwhile, even against a good cornerback, you would expect the difference between Chase and a bad receiver to turn into a few first down receptions during the game.

Good Right Defensive End, Good #1 Cornerback

In this situation, you clearly prefer Sewell to Chase.  In this example, having a top LT will be valuable, as he is going to be used to mitigate the top play of another player.  And if the defense has a strong #1 cornerback, the value added by Chase would be limited, too.  This is the slam dunk case for Sewell, and you hope that you can use your other wide receivers and tight ends to move the ball through the air.

Good Right Defensive End, Bad #1 Cornerback

This is the most difficult case to analyze, which is why I put it last.    For the same reasons as above, Sewell adds a lot of value.  But Chase against a bad cornerback is also very valuable.  This one is more of a toss-up.  If we assume you are fielding Sewell and a bad WR, the hope is that (1) Sewell mitigates the good RDE, (2) the rest of the OL can mitigate the pass rush, and (3) someone — either the bad WR1, or another weapon — can get open before (1) and (2) break down.    If we line up with a bad LT and Chase, we are basically hoping that Chase can get open before the good RDE can get to the quarterback. The offensive coordinator can probably come up with some ways to deal with the bad left tackle — give him help, roll the quarterback to the other side — but there are limited ways a coordinator can turn a bad receiver into a good one.

Conclusion

So we have one clear win for Chase, one small win for Chase, one clear win for Sewell, and one tie.  This analysis obviously argues for picking Chase, but this was just one way to think about it using some extreme assumptions.  What are we missing?

Injury To Burrow

By far the most common reason for arguing for Sewell is that he will help protect Burrow from injury.   I think the best way to think about this might be in the last case, when you face a team with a good RDE and a bad #1 CB.  If the question is “can Chase beat his CB before the good RDE can beat the bad LT”, an answer of “Chase will win first the majority of the time” isn’t such a good answer if the times the good RDE result in your QB getting crushed.  Heck, Chase could win 98% of the time, but if the one play where the good RDE gets to the quarterback winds up in an injury, it’s not worth it.

But that sort of extreme analysis feels foreign to today’s game.  We do not see quarterbacks getting injured by star defensive ends on a weekly basis.  This might be a more interesting question to analyze before the modern rules changes that have helped protect quarterbacks from injury. And while Joe Burrow’s 2020 season was in fact ended due to injury, it was on a play where his left guard — not his left tackle — was overpowered.  And that just reiterates the point from my 2012 article. For an All-Pro to be more valuable than a mediocre left tackle, all of the following needs to happen:

The All-Pro left tackle does his job, and the other four, five or six blockers do their job, and the quarterback makes the right read and an accurate throw, and the receiver makes the catch, and on this particularly play, the player(s) that was (were) blocked by the All-Pro left tackle would have gotten to the quarterback in time to prevent him from throwing and completing said pass had he (they) been blocked by a replacement-level tackle.

The orange text in that paragraph was what failed Burrow in 2020, and drafting Sewell wouldn’t fix that.  

Conclusion

Today’s analysis obviously ignores what happens on running plays. And we shouldn’t do that: a strong left tackle will make a big difference on those plays, much more than a strong wide receiver. That will neutralize to some degree the added value a top receiver adds on a passing play.   An elite left tackle prospect or a very good wide receiver prospect?  I’d go with the elite left tackle prospect.  But if the two players are equal, the wide receiver is the better pick in the modern game that relies on moving the ball through the air, as he is the attacker and difference-maker: all the left tackle can do is mitigate another good player.