Building from the ground up

For full disclosure, I am personally a fan of Aaron Rodgers. I loved him at Cal and I think he is doing the best job he can in Green Bay, in a situation where the probability for success was very low.

I know that everyone says the Packers have a terrible offensive line, but the effect of not having a good offensive line is absolutely debilitating, as evidenced by the Packers this year. If Aaron Rodgers and Brett Favre switched teams, the Aaron Rodgers-led team would have beaten the Brett Favre-led team. I was thinking:

If your offensive line can't block, you can't run the ball.
If you can't run the ball, you have to throw.

If your offensive line can't block, your quarterback gets sacked.

If your offensive line can't block, the defense can put more men into coverage
If the defense puts more men in coverage, your receivers can't get open.
If your receivers can't get open, your quarterback gets sacked.

In two of those three scenarios, the quarterback takes a sack.

It's always obvious to say that you need a good offensive line to have success, but I was curious to what extent this holds true.

If you look at the 3 teams that give up the most sacks per times attempting to pass for the past ten years, only 5 of them have made the playoffs. That's 5 of 30 teams. Just making the playoffs. None of them have won the Super Bowl, nor have they even made the Super Bowl.

If you look at the draft data between 02-08: (I picked 02 because that's when the NFL shifted to 32 teams, and 08 because that's the most recent data from pro-football-reference.com)

There were 1795 players drafted between 02-08.
48 were centers.
149 were tackles.
104 were guards.

That's 16.77% of all players drafted. I thought this was a lot, but then realized on any given offensive play, of the 22 players on the field, 5 are offensive linemen (22.7%), so they are being drafted at a lower rate than they are being retained.

If you look at the first round of the draft between 02-09 (because I did this manually) it's not much different:
15% of the first 10 picks were offensive linemen
14% of first round draft picks were offensive linemen

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the reason teams need multiple years to build offensive lines is because good offensive linemen don't come around too often, and when you have a good line, you need to do what you can to keep them healthy and on your team.

That's why it hurts even more if your "can't-miss" offensive lineman...misses. *cough* Robert Gallery *cough*