Personally I love this time of year and reading Stephen's draft prospect breakdowns. I think it's good to get a lineman's perspective on other linemen, offensive and defensive lineman included.
One highlight, SW thinks Houston had Ed playing out of position:
Here you have a guy who is killing people with his quickness on one play, then dumping them on their ass with his power on the next, but he had to do all these wondrous things from mostly either heavy or head-up alignments in the games that I watched. What I mean by that is that he was either aligned head-up on an offensive lineman, which isn’t a good alignment for trying to fire off upfield, or he was in a “heavy” alignment. That means he was technically shaded to one side or the other, like a 2i on the inside half of the guard, but it wasn’t much of a shade and he was still staring across at least a half a man when he was in his stance.
Again, I’m sure his coaching staff had their reasons, but selfishly I would have liked to have seen Oliver lined up in the gaps a helluva lot more. It would have put him in much better position to really showcase the totality of his talents, which would have in turn allowed him to make even more big plays, which also probably would have translated into more success for his team, in general.
As the song goes, however, we can’t always get what we want, so instead I just have to go by what I did see, and then try to extrapolate from there when projecting who and what I think Oliver should be on the next level. I will say that even with all my bellyaching, this kid was a joy to watch on film.
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