And also, I’m done talking about Tauscher. I guess green bay took him. I guess it looks like Levi Jones wouldve been a good pickup. Shoulda put big walt on IR week 1.

There were quite a few bloggers, like Duke, who predicted that Walt was done last offseason. Some of us were so used to the idea that Walt wasn’t like other players, mere mortals, that we perhaps wished him to play than looking at the facts of reality.

But even with Walt, our line was bad last year. With the exception of when Lock missed the early part of the year, our starting OL was together for quite awhile but they were NOT good. Willis was probably our best OL for the first half of last season (after Walt, of course) and he wasn’t even a starter after Lock did come back (I thought Womack had a good year, better than Sims would have at LG so that’s not necessarily a bad thing for ’08).

We can blame last season in part on injuries to the OL but most of those injuries didn’t mount up until the season was past the half way point.

With that being said, we really didn’t improve the OL in the off-season besides drafting Unger. That’s what most fans are saying. It’s not hindsight if most people here were saying it 6 months ago. If you go back and look at the posts last off-season, most people were constantly complaining about our bad OL. And, yet, here we are today. I know there’s give and take and you can’t have a Pro Bowler at every position and stud back-ups at each spot too… but people here were talking about our starting OL not being that good (even if they were all healthy) and the lack of depth. And that was with assuming Walt would be able to play Superman at LT again.

Oh well…

Too bad – I was still holding out hope – and thinking of the lift getting back such a cornerstone player would give to the team. For some reason, I always assumed he eventually be back.

Got to keep moving forward.

Jones’ knee had been a problem early last year and got worse and worse, finally culminating in the Dallas game when he had trouble physically moving.

I heard on KJR/John Clayton that there isn’t really anything structurally wrong with Walter’s knee. It’s not that there’s a poorly healed joint/cartilage/whatever there. There is something causing pain, and a normal player would deal with it by taking anti-inflammatories, especially at this stage in his career. But Walter Jones is allergic to those drugs, and he simply can’t deal with that level of pain anymore.

And I can’t blame him. Can you imagine playing pro football as a lineman for 12 years, hardly ever missing a game until the last year and a half, and never taking any kind of pain killers ever? That’s a tough guy to me.

It’s football. People get hurt. You’re right. I don’t blame anyone for most injuries, certainly not the FO.

However, look at the clowns on our OL and the history of their injuries the last few years. Look at Lock getting hurt midway through training camp last year and then missing the early part of the year. And then got hurt again and ended up on IR. And the year before that he wasn’t exactly injury free, but he did play in all 16 games and that’s all that matters. But in ’06 he was injured again and missed over a month. There’s a pattern. Same with Sims and Spencer. Except for his rookie year when he didn’t play, Spencer has had something wrong with him EVERY year. That’s four years of proving that he’s going to get hurt. Seems this is a pattern. If we want to resign Sims/Spencer for next year, I don’t think we should be shocked and a legit reason to p!ss and moan when they get hurt again and blame it on “bad luck.”