I don’t think most people realize how important interior o line play is in this scheme. And we haven’t found any competent guards in the late rounds in recent years. I’m not saying we spend a first round pick on an interior o lineman, but guys like Bozeman can’t be a starter at guard considering how bad he’s been.
Why can't he be a starter at Guard? He started at Guard last season, and we were 14-2 and had basically the best offense in the NFL.
If he was so bad, how could that have happened?
Individual offensive lineman, largely, are irrelevant. They almost never have a material impact on a football game. You put Ronnie Stanley on a line with 4 below average lineman, and he'd be lucky to get $10M on the open market.
The Oline is a unit. 3 good players and 2 average or even below average lineman will get you a top 10 unit in this league. It'll be as good or bad as the collective group plays, not by how one Guard plays. You can go look at PFF or even FilmStudy's grades for individual lineman by game. There were games where we won convincingly and seemingly had very productive games offensive, where at least one lineman was barely getting a passing grade.
If Yanda's loss is great, it won't be because we downgraded at one position only. It'll be because none of our interior lineman are playing well. We'll have like 5 guys competing for two guard spots, and we don't even know if Skura will be an impact player coming back from an injury. If we've got 6 guys in house competing for 3 spots, and none of them are worth anything, than losing Yanda probably wouldn't have made much of a difference.