Offensive line continuity – as a unit and positionally 2021 to 2025

Does playing together as an OL unit really help OL performance?

With the exception of his injury-shortened 2022 season, Garett Bolles has been a fixture at LT for the Denver Broncos since he was drafted in 2017. He has played in 14 or more games every season and has started every game he has played in, playing almost every snap in five of his eight seasons. He earned second team All-Pro honors for his 2020 season. His 116 games ranks him fifth among Bronco offensive tackles for career games.

He will mostly likely surpass Claudie Minor this season.

Unfortunately for the Broncos the rest of the offensive line has not been very consistent around him. While this is fairly normal in the modern NFL (which we will discuss more later), the Broncos have actually been fairly stable on the OL over the past five seasons. The Broncos only used two different starting offensive lines in 2023 and the second combo was in the final game of the season in which Mike McGlinchey did not play. The entire OL played together for almost the entirety of the season. In 2024 the Broncos used four different starting OL combos with both Luke Wattenberg and McGlinchey missing time with injuries.

Continuity within a season is good, but continuity from season to season is better. The more time a group of offensive lineman play together, the more familiar they become with each others strengths/weaknesses and the better their communication becomes. In short, an OL the stays healthy and plays together over seasons SHOULD be better than O-lines that don’t. Of course the quality of the QB and RBs for whom they are blocking can have a great effect on this. So let’s look at year to year continuity of OLs around the league.

I used Ourlads.com to predict the starting OL for every NFL team. There have only been 27 spots of the possible 160 spots (32 x 5) that have been manned by the same starting offensive lineman at the same position for the same team for game one 2021 to 2025. Of course, the game one starters could lose his starting spot to injury or the return of the injured starter, but this was the easiest way to run the study. I was actually surprised that there was that much continuity, but many teams invest high draft picks in both tackles and so they have a vested interest in keeping those players starting for them.

Of the 26 there are:

• 7 left tackles
• 3 left guards
• 3 centers
• 4 right guards
• 9 right tackles

Only two teams have had three consistent spots on the OL 2021 to 2025: ATL, and CLE. The Falcons LT, RG and RT (Jake Matthews, Chris Lindstrom and Kaleb McGary) were all high draft picks. The Browns LG, RG and RT (Joel Bitonio, Wyatt Teller and Jack Conklin) were drafted in the second (35th), 5th (116th) and first rounds (8th).

A full half of the league (16 teams) does not have a single spot with a continuous OL starter 2021-2025. Six teams have two and eight teams (including Denver) have only one.

Of the potential 20 slots (one slot being 2021 to 2022 starting LT for the Broncos), the Broncos actually have 13 that have been the same year over year. This is good for the sixth most OL continuity in the league. The Broncos are one of only four teams that expects to have the same game one starters in 2025 at OL relative to 2024. The other three are the Ravens, Panthers, and Browns.

If you want to see the full data set it is in my post below:

While the is interesting, what does it mean in terms of OL performance? That’s a difficult question to answer because how you choose to measure that changes the answers. Do you use offensive points score? or yards per play? or pressure allowed? or yards per carry? Using any of those, the Falcons and Browns are not good despite having three consistent starters 2021-2025 on their OLs. Here are their ranks in those stats

Both offenses were fairly poor despite having three OL starters that had played together for four straight seasons.

If we look at the teams who allowed the least pressure last season we find the Jaguars, Broncos, Bills, Cardinals and Buccaneers in that order. The Jags and Bucs are two of the lowest teams in terms of OL continuity, but they still were able to be elite in protecting the QB last season. The Bucs have zero OL spots that were the same game one starter three years in a row 2021 to 2025. Most teams have at least one.

It would appear that using game one starters might not be the best way to analyze this. I would prefer to use total snaps played together as a unit of five, but that data is nearly impossible to scrub for the entire league over four seasons.

The Bronco OL played 824 snaps together in 2024. Using my metric for OL health, the Broncos had the 7th healthiest OL in the NFL in 2024.

With exception of the Falcons and Dolphins, every time in the top 10 in OL health made the playoffs in 2024. While many of the teams that did a good job of protecting their QB, missed the playoffs like the Jags, Cardinals, Phins, 49ers, Falcons and Jets.

So the takeaway is you need continuity in game one starters AND health all along your OL to do well offensively in the NFL.

In terms of future continuity on the Bronco OL, the Broncos have four of five of our predicted 2025 starters under contract for 2026.