A lot of the work I do for this ongoing Packers project comes down to quantifying things.

How many explosive plays did the Packers get in a given season? How many ballhawks? How often is a certain player lining up in a certain spot? And on and on and on.

It’s a worthwhile pursuit, because the more data points we have, the better we can talk about the way football works and the way certain players contribute to how the Packers function. But within that overall mission, one area of quantification has eluded me: the offensive line.

How do you quantify what the offensive line does? And, more importantly, how do you quantify it in a way that people can understand?

Plenty of people have attempted the first part of that question. ESPN has a variety of stats on offensive line performance now, broken down to the position level. The crew formerly of Football Outsiders have stats about offensive line performance, though not quite as granular as ESPN. And Pro Football Focus, of course, has their grades about every position under the sun.

None are quite what I’m looking for, though. I want a reliable, single-number stat that shows how well a player is performing. On top of that, I want to know where the numbers are coming from and be able to communicate where it’s coming from to people who are interested in the data. Because really, that’s my beef with places like ESPN, FTN, and Pro Football Focus: a lot of their stats are kind of black boxes. They have all their data paywalled or otherwise behind the scenes in such a way that we can’t know exactly how things are calculated.

So, if possible, I wanted to create a stat that shows how an offensive lineman is performing while showing my sources on as much data as possible so other people, if they’re interested, can track it down for themselves. And I think we’ve done that with the Offensive Lineman Negative Play Rate.

Here’s how it works.

How Offensive Lineman Negative Play Rate is calculated

I start with the number of total snaps a player has played in the regular season. Using data from Pro Football Focus, I add up all the sacks, hits, and hurries surrendered by a given player during the regular season, as well as the total number of penalties for which that player was blamed. Then I add to that take the number of blown run blocks blamed on that player by Sports Information Solutions. That gives us a total number of “negative plays” for which the offensive lineman was responsible during the regular season.

I divide the total number of snaps by the number of negative plays, then multiply that total by 100 to give us the rate of negative plays a player is responsible for per 100 plays, and there we go.

That’s Offensive Lineman Negative Play Rate — a single number stat that shows us how often out of 100 plays a player is doing something negative.

Currently, I have enough data to give us a comprehensive record of almost every offensive lineman (with a few exceptions due to incomplete data on Sports Information Solutions) who played at least 100 regular season snaps for the Packers dating back to the 2015 season. Here’s the comprehensive list:

For a more recent look at the Packers, here’s just the 2024 linemen.

Quick takeaways

Overall, I think this number works pretty well. It seems to align just about perfectly with the eye test — guys like David Bakhtiari gets very high marks, and guys like Jason Spriggs and Kyle Murphy get low marks.

Generally speaking, it seems like interior linemen give up fewer negative plays than tackles, which also tracks with what we know about football: it’s easier to give up pressures around the outside than up the middle just because you have more space. Consequently, it might help to compare positions to themselves, and I’ve already compiled that data. Here are the individualized lists of centers, guards, and tackles.

It also appears that the Packers peaked on the offensive line in 2019 and 2020 and have declined slightly since then, but not by much. Overall, the line remains very strong.

Possible weaknesses in this data

This number isn’t perfect; I plan for this to be an iterative process and I want to continue to fine tune the stat. Already there are things I don’t like about it.

For one, I weight all pressures the same in this stat, and that’s obviously a bit of a problem. Sacks are obviously worse than hits or hurries; a quarterback can be flushed from the pocket and even knocked down entirely and still throw a touchdown pass. It happens every week in the NFL. I just don’t know how much more to weight a sack than a hurry, though it’s possible I could just look at sacks. I want to keep it relatively comprehensive, though, so for now I’m going to include all pressures and blown run blocks.

I also don’t like how much this relies on charting services like Pro Football Focus and Sports Information Solutions, but there’s not much that can be done about that. Maybe someday I’ll have time to chart all these things myselves, but that day is not today.

Finally, I don’t like that I don’t have a measure of positive plays for linemen. I’d love to celebrate their wins as much as criticising their losses, but I just don’t have the numbers for that kind of thing right now, I’m sorry to say. For right now, we’ll have to restrict ourselves to pointing out when an offensive linemen is doing the fewest bad things and go from there. With this stat in hand, we can go a little way toward doing that.