I thought this was interesting enough to warrant its own topic so it didn’t get lost in the other thread.
Here’s what my favorite NFL podcaster (Oliver Connolly, former scout/coach, currently on NFL Network) had to say about Mays on their FA reaction pod I just got around to listening to earlier today:
“That is an unbelievable fit. I love Cade Mays a lot more than consensus. I think the idea of paying Linderbaum $90M/year when you can pick up Cade Mays is preposterous. If you’re doing best player to scheme fit in this entire free agent class, I thought Cade Mays to the Lions made an extraordinary amount of sense.”
“I just think with Mays, it’s so rare to find a center of that size playing inside who actually, I think, moves better than people expect. He’s a little bit stiff, a little bit stilted in some of the run game, the screen game stuff, you’re kind of limited in what you can do in that regard, but for the Lions a lot of that fun stuff flows off of Penei Sewell anyway, flows off the guards, flows off the tackles. They leave the center as the pivot, so when he can just double and climb to the second level, I mean, he just kills people at the point of attack. And if you just look through any of the advanced data around pass protection, whether it’s time to pressure one on one stuff, he was much better than Linderbaum last year. I mean it’s just that simple. You cannot run him over. He picks everything up in terms of the stunts, the games, the IDing and things from depth. I really thought the Bears, once Dalman retired, would say Mays is the guy.”
And just for comparison’s sake, here’s what he had to say about the Linderbaum signing:
“I think it is insane to pay a zone, kick-step, stretch center any kind of money like that. A guy who doesn’t hold up in one-on-one pass pro, gets run over in the pass game all the time. The guy who blows protections consistently. Why have the Ravens been in the top 5 in the league for multiple years in free runners through the A&B gaps if he’s in charge of handling protections? The position is so much more valuable than it’s given credit for, but he doesn’t do the things that make it valuable. He does the things Ryan Neuzeil does at a better level. He makes some extraordinary plays, he puts some things on the menu for you in the run game, sure, but Aaron Brewer does that and doesn’t blow the protection stuff, so why is he getting paid that kind of money?”
“I value center more than most but I value the things that make them valuable, setting protections, being able to hold them in one-on-one pass protections would be pretty valuable and that the areas where he’s the weakest. Like you’re truly paying that kind of money for a stretch runner.”
