you can definitely find quality starters in the draft especially when you draft early - most teams expect their 1st and 2nd round picks to contribute immediately - why's it difficult to imagine the ravens taking an offensive lineman in the 1st or 2nd round and expecting them to improve the OL?
the ravens have the bare bones of a pretty good OL health-willing - and obviously health is a question mark but that's also why you add talent in the draft to create depth where we have injury questions like at tackle - we've just extended Mekari who we know can be a solid swing tackle so we're probably 1 tackle away from being certain we won't be playing also-rans at tackle at least to start the season
center is a question for sure but it's not the end of the world and there's more non-draft options at C than at OT
an OL of Stanley-Phillips/Cleveland-Colon-Zeitler-James with Mekari as swing tackle would be fine and it's highly likely we're going to add a high draft pick at either C or OT and then you're looking at a pretty decent looking OL
no reason to think that the 2022 OL should suck at all beyond general pessimism about injury recoveries
We're usually very aligned, but I gotta be honest, I'm nervous about this one. Stanley and James are HUGE question marks. All that means is that things could go really well for us on that front, or maybe it could be really bad, or most like something in between.
This is just my guess. Stanley comes back and plays well, just not at the elite level we've seen. That should be an upgrade over this year.
LG will likely be neutral to slightly improved. You're still gonna have either Powers, Clevland, or Tyree at that spot. Personally I think Powers is out, and Clevland wins the job because at this point I think the team believes that he has the higher upside at this point. Unless Clevland takes a big step forward, this is mostly neutral.
Center. This is likely a pretty strong drop-off. Colon is probably a NFL quality player but likely in the bottom tier of starters. This is pretty scary.
RG is Zeitler. You would hope to get a similarly productive year out of him. So neutral but in a good way.
RT James or Mekari. One of these two should be serviceable, but very unlikely to have extremely high level of play. Seems like this is going to be mostly neutral to slight improvement.
As I see it, you're gonna be looking at something like this.
Improvement
Neutral
Big dropoff
Neutral
Neutral
Too me, it just seems like the OL is gonna be relatively similar to this year and the depth situation is going to be critical. I'm honestly not expecting a top 10 OL. Maybe top 16.