Jaguars offensive line ranked higher than you think

It’s the offseason and time for rankings and lists, as we saw when Pro Football Focus ranked the NFL rosters and the Jacksonville Jaguars ended up in the bottom half of the league. While PFF ranked the overall rosters, they’ve moved to breaking down and ranking individual units for teams from this past season, starting with the offensive line.

The Jaguars rank probably much higher than you’d think, too.

This might be the most surprising ranking of any that our grades spit out. Carrying the unit is center Brandon Linder, who doesn’t get talked about as much as he probably should. He’s turned into one of the game’s elite centers and has been extremely consistent since entering the league in 2014.

I’m guessing these rankings are based on a cumulative grade for the entire projected started offensive line, which you can see PFF has above. Obviously, most believe that second-round pick Cam Robinson will end up starting at the left guard position over Patrick Omameh, but either way I think most would consider being ranked in the Top 15 is surprising.

There is a bit of a false narrative that part of why Blake Bortles played so poorly last season was because he was running for his life, etc., but that’s not true. He was sacked and harassed the least amount in his career, by good margin, while having no run game to lean on.

The lack of run game however, was for multiple reasons, one of which was the poor play on the offensive line and having a revolving door at one of the guard spots. Even so, I don’t think many people would think the Jaguars offensive line would rank as high as it did in this instance, because almost universally it’s seen as one of the weakest links on the team.

I think overall it’s probably an average unit in the league, which is slightly lower than how PFF ranks them.