Is the Washington Football Team offensive line the best in the NFC East?

Okay, I promised you some qualifiers. Here they are.

Line play is not about individual play. More than any other position group, the offensive line is dependent on cohesiveness. And though PFF goes to great lengths to analyze all the crucial factors in determining a lineman’s effectiveness, it will always remain subjective. Factors beyond individual talent will always figure into any analysis, and so PFF, like all analytics, is necessarily limited.

So if we consider other traditional gauges of offensive line play, Washington does not look nearly as good as those PFF numbers would suggest.

Washington ranks last in the division in yards per rushing attempt, and that’s true even coming off a dominant rushing performance against Dallas in Week 7. Their 3.9 trails Dallas’ 4.0, New York’s 4.5, and Philadelphia’s excellent 5.0.

And Washington’s “sacks allowed” total of 26 ranks third in the division, ahead of only Philadelphia’s 28. Both Dallas and New York have allowed 20 sacks so far.

Now let’s qualify those qualifiers.

The sack total is easy to account for. The two teams with the best numbers in the division, New York and Dallas, have (or in Dallas’ case, had) quarterbacks who could avoid sacks. Both Daniel Jones and Dak Prescott, when he was healthy, have been very effective at bailing out their offensive lines. Even Philadelphia’s Carson Wentz has been better able to manipulate the pocket and withstand pressure than the Washington Football Team’s Dwayne Haskins proved to be.

Haskins’ pocket presence was not good before his benching, and his inexperience has shown in his inability to slide in the pocket to avoid pressure. In other words, a sack is not always on the offensive line. A quarterback’s pocket awareness and physical talent can affect that number quite a bit.

As for the rushing numbers, you could make the case that Washington, which began the season without a single player who had proven himself as a particularly good runner, has been improving as the season has gone along. The two primary runners, Antonio Gibson and J.D. McKissic, both look far better in Week 7 than they did in Week 1.

Dallas, even with a stud like Ezekiel Elliott in the backfield, is virtually even with the Washington Football Team in terms of YPC, and the Giants’ very good 4.5 figure is aided immensely by quarterback Daniel Jones’ stunning 9.5 yards per carry. He is his team’s leading rusher by a wide margin, and that 9.5 is more than a yard better than the existing YPC record for a quarterback in a season (Michael Vick’s 8.4 in 2006).

There is no qualifier for the Eagles’ number. Even with lead back Miles Sanders in and out of the lineup this year, they have run the ball better than Washington.

Another qualifier is sample size. Seven games provides a decent set of numbers, but it is still susceptible to outliers. For instance, if Washington hadn’t played Los Angeles and Aaron Donald yet, their sack number would look a lot better.

Those things even out over the course of a season, so we will have a better sense of how to interpret these raw numbers when we have 16 games’ worth of data (And, then again, the Washington Football Team’s sack total is improved by not having to play the Washington Football Team’s defense – just ask Dallas and Philadelphia).