I love Lamp, or do I? The College Tackle to NFL Guard Conversion Story

I don’t know about you but I’m wrong about prospects a lot. I heard something once that said good analysts spend most of their time being wrong, I don’t think it was about draft analysts but I think the rule applies. And I’m haunted by the many misses of past years; when I see a potential physical, downhill, but limited running back that I love – the ghost of Elijah Holyfield visits me. When I see an upside, small school sack monster I would dearly love to draft – Quanterus Smith is at my door. When I think I’ve found the next Wes Welker or Julian Edelman, TJ Moe or Tavon Austin is who I see.

Never does this happen more than when I see an Offensive Tackle I think could “kick inside”. We see it written a lot, this time of year – an Offensive Tackle that you don’t think can quite hold up against the edge rushers of the NFL: ah, he could kick inside at the next level. I think it’s often written lazily, I think I do it lazily too, without much thought for whether that lineman could actually play inside at Guard which is a wholly different position, as we all know, and most of the best Guards in the NFL are not simply poor man’s Tackles.

The rather sizeable ghosts I see whenever I write “kick inside” are Forrest Lamp and Danny Watkins. I was not alone in projecting those two to play Guard at the next level, and the Chargers and the Eagles thought it enough to spend premium picks in the top two rounds on both. When I look back now, there were some warning signs, I did think Lamp was beaten easily by inside moves and didn’t have much of a power step. I also wondered whether he was a little prone to waist-bending – something I actually put down to his lack of length on the outside rather than simply being a waist-bender. It felt for all the world like the phonebooth would be where both were best suited.

This is exactly it though, best suited at Guard is what they should be, but not in Lamp and Watkins case, to hide deficiencies. Best suited at Guard needs to mean a talented offensive lineman who’s strengths are accentuated by playing at Guard and kicking inside is not used as a magic bullet to solve all of their problems as a lineman.

This is where the Ravens come in because, we’ve been one of the most frequent teams to try this strategy. Presumably that’s because of the greatest living example of a college Tackle to pro Guard conversion job – Marshal Yanda. I’m sure we were looking to strike gold again but I think Yanda teaches us the most important lesson about this frequent draft trope, if you want a Tackle to “kick inside” and be successful he needs to be a talented lineman first and foremost. Those of us that remember Yanda earlier in his career, know that he played Right Tackle to a pretty high level with the Ravens – he could have survived and most likely thrived outside over several seasons – he is a hall of fame offensive lineman first, who was just best suited to play Guard.

I definitely think this is where teams go wrong with this, looking for a lineman that will miraculously improve and be a better pro because they have the bright idea nobody else had to move a talented but flawed lineman inside and solve all his problems. Yes, colleges are more hard-up than the NFL in terms of talent, and yes, they face less of a challenge with edge defenders than NFL teams do. They can afford to have less athletic players on the outside of their line but they’re not frequently wrong about the best position for their talented enough to get drafted linemen.

In addition to this, the track records of teams trying to do this are a pretty sizeable warning. Chasing Marshal Yanda could be a little foolish – the juice isn’t worth the squeeze when the juice is made up of Danny Watkins, Forrest Lamp and Germain Ifedi. Yanda is like the little passion fruit cup you float on top – sure it’s delicious, but was it worth it when you have to drink three Jeremiah Poutasi’s to get to him? To extend the drinking metaphor even further to Harry Potter fans – I’m imagining Seattle Seahawks fans trying to endure James Carpenter’s level of play after being a first round Tackle and eventual conversion to Guard like I see Albus Dumbledore straining to ask Harry Potter to “kill me” as he’s drinking the liquid to get to Lord Voldemort’s horcrux. Sure, Zack Martin might be at the bottom of the bowl but like Harry and Dumbledore, you might find it’s a fake and you have in fact just uncovered James Carpenter.

There have of course, been a lot more success stories of converting college tackles to pro interior offensive linemen than just Marshal Yanda – I exaggerate when I make the case that there is only him to chase. But there have also been many failures, both spectacular and small. I took a look at a big cross-section of these offensive linemen to see if there was anything at all that was predictive or even indicative of success at being able to do this.

We’ll start with the non-Ravens examples to try and build a picture of what might work or not work before moving on to assessing how the Ravens have done it. I did not look at every offensive lineman but I did look at good sample size of three different types of interior offensive linemen in the NFL.

1. Those excellent Guards/Centers that have played either all of their career (College and NFL) or the majority of their career on the interior of the offensive line

2. Those excellent Guards/Centers that played the majority of their college career at Offensive Tackle but have played the majority of their NFL career on the interior of the offensive line

3. Those Guards/Centers who could be considered busts that played the majority of their college career at Offensive Tackle but have played the majority of their NFL career on the interior of the offensive line

As usual with these posts, I’m looking for empirical data on these prospects in college not my own or others’ opinions about them from their evaluations. With a topic like this, opinions can be all over the map. I’m also not drawing many conclusions about a team’s tendencies around this because blocking schemes change regularly and therefore what teams want from their linemen changes regularly. I’ll point out later when we look at the Ravens, how clear the changes in offensive scheme were signalled by the type of offensive lineman they selected in the draft.

It’s important to note here that there are two types of conversion from college Tackle to pro Guard/Center. We’ll call them the pre-meditated conversion and the accidental conversion. Some NFL teams will, from the very start, envision their shiny new draft pick as an interior linemen even if they played Offensive Tackle in college. They most often signal this by the position they write down on the card to be handed to the commissioner and read out. But this can also be signalled by an early first year training camp move. Accidental conversions are when the teams get the player in and they spend at least their first full training camp at Offensive Tackle before being moved. I’m inferring here that teams only move those players when they have managed to get their eyes on them in practice and have seen what they’re all about.

There are very few accidental conversion jobs that work – Rodger Saffold is one, who only started playing Guard his fourth year in the league - but most of them don’t work. This isn’t a surprise though, if its an accidental conversion it’s probably because you’ve exhausted the options of playing the guy outside at Tackle and you’re trying to salvage something from what looks like it might end up being a bad pick, like the Seahawks did with James Carpenter.

The first thing you notice in the data about group one – those successful interior linemen who were always interior linemen – and it really does stick out, is their pass blocking efficiency. Now, this isn’t perfect, I don’t trust player evaluation services to always understand who blew what assignment to result in the sack but it can at least give us an indicator. And almost all of the interior linemen who have always been interior linemen who have become successful NFL interior linemen gave up very few pressures themselves inside. Damien Lewis who had a very good rookie season this past year gave up the most pressures his final year in college of the group that I looked at, but he also played on far more pass blocking snaps than any of the other linemen on his run to the National Championship and Joe Burrow’s Heisman.

This extends, for the most part, to the college Offensive Tackles who have become successful interior linemen in the NFL. Guys like Connor Williams and Austin Corbett were very efficient in pass protection. There are some outliers in this group – Brandon Scherff gave up over 20 pressures his final season at Iowa – but there are very few. In the third group though, those unsuccessful conversion jobs, relative pass blocking inefficiency was the norm, guys like Jeremiah Poutasi and Jamon Brown gave up a lot of pressures from their Tackle spot in college. The one exception was, ironically, Forrest Lamp who was one of the most efficient pass blocking linemen in the whole study.

I also found that experience playing at Guard at some point in your career, pre-NFL doesn’t really matter to your success at the next level. Germain Ifedi was the 13th ranked Guard in the nation as a senior in High School, played there his Freshman year when he got on campus at Texas A&M (he was blocked by Jake Matthews and Cedric Ogbuehi outside) before moving outside to play the majority of his college career at Tackle. It didn’t help him in his conversion back to Guard at the NFL level. But equally Joe Thuney played some of his Sophomore year and all of his Junior year at Guard and this did help him at the next level, although if I remember rightly his play at Tackle was equally as impressive as his Guard play.

Experience at different positions in general didn’t really show up as important in the study and I delved back far enough into High School careers to find out that Wyatt Teller was the 11th ranked Defensive End in the nation. Mostly, the Guards who never moved played Guard in high school too and the Tackles who converted to Guard in the NFL had also played Tackle in high school.

In comparing their athletic testing, on the whole, the successful conversion jobs were more athletic than the guys who haven’t been able to make the position change at the NFL. It’s not stark but its just enough when you look across all of the different tests. Across nearly every test, there was on average a 10% increase in the percentile of results of the two groups, with the successful conversions being more athletic than their less successful counterparts. This only got more stark when looking at the testing most important to success at the Offensive Line positions like 10 yard split times where the average increased to about 15%.

Because of the many different positions these players were classified as, it was only really possible to take a cross-class comparison from the athletic testing relative to their size rather than to their position. But, when you look at those NFL guards who were Tackles in college, and can be compared to their Tackle contemporaries in terms of athletic testing, you find that the linemen who underwent successful conversion from Tackle to Guard were much more comparable to their peers at Tackle than the ones who have ultimately not been successful in the NFL. This is a key finding I think, in that the data bears out the hypothesis that you shouldn’t be looking for less athletic Tackles to kick inside so that you can cover their deficiency with the phonebooth.

There was also, unsurprisingly, some correlation between successful Tackle to Guard conversions and arm length. None of the successful guys (one exception but he’s a Raven so not counted here) I charted had longer than 34 inch arms, while many of the guys who didn’t make it, did have longer than 34 inch arms. There were however plenty of those who didn’t make it who also had shorter arms. Therefore the rule here I think, is that if a college Offensive Tackle hasn’t dominated especially in pass protection despite having good length for the position, stand up James Carpenter and his 34-inch arms, then a move inside to Guard isn’t going to miraculously help him. But that on the whole, a good reason for moving a dominant offensive tackle inside, a la Zack Martin, is because he has shorter arms than would be ideal at the next level.

Finally and importantly for the small Ravens side of this study, as you’ll see, I looked at the efficiency of the offensive line as a whole that these players were a part of in college. There was lots of missing data here because the Football Outsiders database, while excellent, doesn’t go back far enough to chart every player, especially the busts who were on the whole older players, as I cut a lot of slack to see if players were going to be successful. However an alarmingly high number of successful interior linemen in the NFL, whether it be guys who always played inside in college or Tackle-Guard/Center conversion jobs, were part of efficient run blocking offensive lines in college.

Pass blocking in terms of sack rate was all over the place but a list including Wyatt Teller, Shaq Mason, Quenton Nelson, Laken Tomlinson, Damien Lewis, Joe Thuney, Cody Whitehair, Connor Williams and David Edwards were all part of top third units in the nation terms of run blocking efficiency. This was either in line yards per carry or opportunity rate. Line yards per carry is a data-point that rewards the Offensive Line for the yards it creates for Running Backs based on a weighted percentage of credit assigned to the line depending on how long the run went for. Opportunity rate is the rate at which a team’s carries managed to gain four yards – so how often the line did it’s job in the run game. This is not a comprehensive finding and I would have to do more digging to be sure but it appears to have some truth to it.

So to summarise the findings, here are some guide-rails I would try to adhere to:

1. Be deliberate about the conversion job, identify the move inside early in their first year with the team, preferably in training camp

2. If you want to kick a college Offensive Tackle inside, the data on successful past conversion jobs, strongly indicates that they should measure up well athletically to their peers. Don’t simply take a less athletic Offensive Tackle that you like and assume he can play inside

3. Bit of an obvious one but shorter arms is a good reason to project a dominant college offensive tackle inside at the next level – it’s not a guarantee of success but it’s a valid excuse for moving them. On the flip side, there is more of a guarantee – don’t draft a college offensive tackle who wasn’t dominant even with comparatively good length for the position and expect playing in a phonebooth to solve all his issues

4. They are more likely to be an efficient pass blocker – don’t look for the guys who can’t pass block in college and think you can move them inside – you’re chasing the exceptions to the rule and that’s never a good idea

5. Experience of playing Guard or Center before, alone, in either High School or college, will not help in the conversion job

6. For an NFL interior lineman to be successful, whether it be as a conversion or not, appear to be more likely to have been part of an efficient run-blocking offensive line

As for the Ravens, as mentioned up top, they do this quite a lot – and with some success too. Yanda is the obvious one already mentioned but Kelechi Osemele, Alex Lewis and Ryan Jensen have all had some success in the league. But I actually think the Ravens success in this area, adds a seventh guideline to the above:

7. Have great offensive line coaching that can smooth the transition and can build great offensive linemen first and foremost

The Ravens guys break the mould I’ve presented. Alex Lewis is not a particularly athletic guy and was middle of the road compared to his peers at Tackle, as well as giving up a lot of pressures his final year at Nebraska. Kelechi Osemele has very long arms and seems to be a classic case of an Offensive Tackle not being dominant at the college level despite long arms that wouldn’t have his deficiencies hidden by the phone booth. But they have all made successful careers to varying degrees. I can’t be sure but I do think this is in large part down to the coaching they get when they’re in the NFL and of course the scheme fit.

Scheme is why the Ravens tendencies at Offensive Line are only worth charting very carefully because they have changed what they look for due to the changing blocking schemes, coming and going with their frequent changes in Offensive Co-ordinator. A quick look back for anyone who has been evaluating players for some time will show you exactly when Gary Kubiak took over the Ravens offense like a fossil with evidence that betrays it’s year of origin. In 2013 we took Ryan Jensen and Rick Wagner, neither of whom were particularly fleet of foot (I had to look up Jensen – didn’t watch much Colorado State Pueblo tape back then) and wouldn’t be ideally suited to a zone scheme followed by John Urschel in 2014. I remember Urschel as an obviously smart and easy mover who wasn’t particularly strong at the point of attack and a much better fit in a zone scheme. Gary Kubiak took over our offense after the 2013 season and installed his heavy zone-based offense.

The Ravens have nothing in particular that they look for in Tackle to Guard conversions. Indeed Tyre Phillips, the latest in this production line, looks different again to others in that he wasn’t a particularly efficient pass blocker but also has long, over 35-inch arms. What they do seem to look for, when we look at the empirical data, is their linemen to be part of an efficient run blocking offensive line. Of the guys I can chart for this, only Ben Bredeson was not part of a top third unit in the nation in terms of run blocking efficiency measured by the statistics I explained earlier – yards per carry and opportunity rate. Indeed Orlando Brown Jr., Jermaine Eluemunor, Ronnie Stanley, Bradley Bozeman, Ben Powers and Tyre Philips could be considered to have been part of elite run blocking units in terms of efficiency in college.

This could be a coincidence but compare it to the findings I had on the defensive line and you start to see a pattern emerge across a pretty decent sample size of the Ravens selecting players in the trenches from efficient running offensive lines and efficient against the run defensive lines.

To finish, with all of this, my mind is drawn to Alijah Vera Tucker. I’m a big fan of the offensive lineman from USC in this year’s draft and he fits the bill as a potential conversion (if we can even call him that) from college Offensive Tackle to Guard at the next level. He has a season at each position in college and I thought his tape was almost equally good at both positions. I preferred his Guard tape but it was marginal and I think he can be an elite Guard at the next level. But he fits the profile of a successful interior lineman at the next level that I’ve put together here and I think he fits the Yanda bill in that I think he can play at Tackle at the next level, I just think he’s a better fit at Guard and overall, he’s just a great offensive lineman first – which we now know is what’s important first.