Bengals: Explaining the Jonah Williams dialogue
Action spawns reaction. The larger the action, the larger the reaction. But contrary to what appears to be popular belief, the arrival of Orlando Brown Jr. has not in turn made Jonah Williams any less of a player than he's been.You would never know that based solely off the last few months. The Williams discourse […]
Action spawns reaction. The larger the action, the larger the reaction. But contrary to what appears to be popular belief, the arrival of Orlando Brown Jr. has not in turn made Jonah Williams any less of a player than he's been.
You would never know that based solely off the last few months.
The Williams discourse has been complicated to say the least, and it certainly didn't use to be this way. The problem to me is that it doesn't have to be complex. The facts are very clear for everyone to see.
Williams, by every objective measure, is rated as a league-average starting offensive tackle. That is based on how he's performed in his three years manning the left tackle spot for Cincinnati. All of his ups and downs combined into a single evaluation nets a player who would find himself rated near the middle of 64 projected starters at the position.
With just over 3,000 career snaps under his belt, Williams' average Pro Football Focus offense and pass blocking grades are 68.5 and 68.7, respectively. His peak offense grade was 74.5 in 2021, and peak pass block grade was 75.8 in 2020.
His lows in both categories (61 offense and 62.8 pass block) both were from 2022, and that's important when making sense of the conversation, but it should not end it outright considering there's more quality production from the two years prior.
Jonah Williams season PFF grades
| Year | 2020 (Ranking) | 2021 (Ranking) | 2022 (Ranking) |
|---|---|---|---|
Offense Grade | 70.1 (39/59) | 74.5 (24/55) | 61.0 (48/57) |
Pass Block Grade | 75.8 (28/59) | 67.5 (34/55) | 62.8 (49/57) |
A What Have You Done For Me Lately mindset will create a hole that Williams can't climb out of. Instead of labeling that as a blanket death sentence, is it too much to wonder if his pedigree of being a high quality collegiate tackle and passable NFL starter for two years grants him a chance to bounce back in a contract year?
If you were to take his career average grades and rank them in each of the last three years, he would once again fall near the middle of the pack. That's three years of being what you would consider league average, and even if the final grades for 2022 were lower than normal, the games that made up that slate showcased promising performances.
Last year, Williams graded higher than 80 in pass blocking in four games, all of them happening the day of, or after he dislocated his knee. These individual showings are unfortunately countered out by four games with pass block grades below 45. Two of those games were against the Cleveland Browns, including the Monday Night Football debacle wherein he was charged with three sacks allowed.
That leads us to the dominant talking point with Williams. PFF charged him with responsibility for 13 of Joe Burrow's sacks taken last year. It's a damning figure on first glance, but that's also a reflection of what people believe when it comes to o-line play.
Fantasy football doesn't involve linemen. There are no positive counting stats when it comes to those protecting the skill players. Sacks are drive killers that are immediately, and unquestionably, placed on the lineman's shoulders. The only aspect of their job that anyone cares about is to not screw up, despite playing arguably the hardest positions on the field.
It's a ridiculous concept, but not one that is changing anytime soon.
Let's operate under the assumption that all 13 sacks listed are indeed Williams' fault entirely (which is not how this works in the real world but here we are). It would be one thing if they were equally distributed across the 17 games he played in, but that's far from the case. He wasn't consistently getting beat in the worst ways possible, rather specific matchups were giving him fits.
In three games against the Pittsburgh Steelers, Browns, and New England Patriots, Williams allowed eight of his 13 sacks. Simple math tells us that a mere five sacks were allowed in the 14 other contests. The Tennessee Titans, Kansas City Chiefs, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, even the Baltimore Ravens game when he played through the dislocated knee for the first time: all clean sheets.
He was also close to perfect the second time he played the Steelers. I broke down that game on YouTube here:
Was it still a down year? Absolutely, and that's reflective of the standard Williams established at Alabama and his first two years in Cincinnati, when he was viewed as an asset on a porous line.
What essentially boils to three bad games instilling a belief that Williams isn't even worthy to start on an NFL team anymore is absolute poppycock. But it's obviously more than just that.
The last seven years of Bengals football has provided plenty of examples of porous offensive line play. Cedric Ogbuehi, Jake Fisher, Billy Price, Alex Redmond, Bobby Hart, Russell Bodine, T.J. Johnson, John Jerry, Andre Smith, Michael Jordan, Hakeem Adeniji, and Isaiah Prince have all started real football games for the Bengals in recent years.
Perspective is important. While Williams has yet to develop into an above average starter after being drafted just outside the top 10 four years ago, grouping him anywhere near this cluster of undesirables is absurd. Being average as an offensive lineman makes you more of an asset than being average anywhere else on the field due to the sheer scarcity of truly high quality players.
Brown is the closest the Bengals have had a high quality blocker since Andrew Whitworth, and Williams requested a trade from the Bengals just a day after the deal was reported. While it might be easy to look at this in binary terms, it's anything but. The Bengals sought an opportunity to upgrade the position and took advantage. Any self respecting franchise would do the same. Williams, on the other hand, also acted with his own interest in mind and wanted an opportunity to keep playing the position elsewhere.
There isn't a villain in this scenario, just two parties who were protecting themselves.
That brings us to the now, where Williams is still recovering from not one, but two dislocated knees on his own terms. When he's cleared to practice, practice he will. He's got a competition to partake in at a new position.
What feels like the weirdest part of this discourse is the specifics of the competition itself. It will feature Williams, La'el Collins, Jackson Carman, and long shots Cody Ford and Hakeem Adeniji. Realistically, it's a two or three player race.
Out of all these options, Williams and Collins are the most promising based off their track records, but if we were to judge strictly off last season, the edge would go to Williams. Collins graded out at 57.9 on offense and 44.2 in pass blocking despite being charged with five sacks allowed. On a snap-for-snap basis, Williams was the better player. He simply won more consistently, despite his losses leading to more takedowns of his quarterback.
While sacks are a product of multiple things going wrong, pressures are more easily identifiable as an isolated loss by the lineman. As Twitter user WhoDeyKnowitALL pointed out, a greater percentage of pressures allowed came from the right tackle spot compared to the left tackle spot for the Bengals in 2022.
This isn't to knock on Collins, who was a dominant force with the Dallas Cowboys just two years ago, but rather a reminder that Williams' bookend was allowing just as much chaos to the pocket. The benefit of playing right tackle is when you lose quickly, it's more times than not right in the eyesight of a right-handed quarterback. Evading pressure from the right usually takes you to the left, where if your left tackle is losing as well… bad things happen.
Collins is also not 100% healthy right now and has four years of age on Williams. This brings Carman into the picture, the player who's currently taking reps with the starters in OTAs.
No one player on the Bengals' roster is a bigger mystery than Carman. After losing competitions at guard two years in a row, the former second-round pick finally got a chance to play tackle. The results were mixed, but the perception was overwhelming positive. That's what happens when standards are lowered from past performance.
Carman's 10-quarter postseason run has given him a new lease on NFL life. He's reportedly in much better shape entering his third year, and his confidence should higher after being a starter in two playoff wins.
And yet, him beating out Williams in a position battle still seems unlikely, because Williams is still the better player. The sample size to say the contrary with meaning just doesn't exist yet.
In a perfect world, all three tackles look the part when training camp comes around, forcing the Bengals to make a tough decision. While we're at it, both Ford and Adeniji will look great as well.
That perfect world doesn't exist. Odds are one tackle will separate from the others, or they'll all show their own faults in one way or another.
The safest bet right now is that Williams is fully healthy come training camp, and he'll have the inside track to win the right tackle job. The player that he was last year would be enough to become the best right tackle the Bengals have had in a quite some time. A return to the player we saw from 2020-21 would be even better.
But that's why these things aren't decided in June, or by sacks allowed from months prior. Whomever looks the best in camp will start. The Bengals will want to see if Williams can be that guy again.
Featured image via Sam Greene-USA TODAY Sports
