For OL, the advantage and disadvantage of height

[toffee]

it's hard to find five short, wide, athletic men with disproportionately long arms, and short legs. Those are stuff from laboratories by mad professors.

If one could assemble five of those dudes, might just work marvelously. Short legs for quicker accelerations, linemen do not need high top speed, right? Long arms for all the hand stuffs, wide body to fill gaps, and low center of gravity for that pad level.


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Poona Ford got me thinking in a very similar way to how he appears to have gotten you (toffee) thinking.

Ford was Big-12 Defensive Lineman of the Year in his final year at Texas, but he still went undrafted. 256 guys were drafted, but Ford had to wait and sign a free-agent contract with the Seahawks after the draft was over. To me, an outsider looking in, that makes 31 teams look really stupid for not risking even a compensational seventh-round pick to see if any of Ford's success at Texas would translate to the NFL, and it makes one team look really lucky that none of those other 31 teams was willing to risk even a late-seventh-round pick. The result was that the Seahawks got Ford's first three years for $482,666, $572,666, and $752,668 against the cap, a tremendous bargain for a solid NFL starter (it could have been an even greater bargain if the Seahawks had started giving Ford more playing time earlier in his rookie season, which Pete Carroll said the team should have done). And why did the Seahawks get this bargain? Because Ford was considered "too short" for the defensive-tackle position.

I have to admit I find it hard to ignore the fact that the guy who is still the lightest DT in the NFL, and who was also the shortest before Poona came along, is also by far the best DT in the game today.

So that got me thinking about why teams want DTs to be tall.
One thing that came to mind is weight. A shorter lineman is usually a lighter lineman, and therefore easier to push around. But Ford is pretty heavy. In fact, he's right around (just above!) the average weight for DTs, despite being much shorter than the average height.
Another thing that came to mind is arm length. Shorter linemen tend to have shorter arms, and are therefore at a disadvantage starting with the initial "punch" at opposing linemen. But Ford has unusually long arms for a man his height, so he doesn't have that disadvantage on the punch.
With his extremely low center of gravity, Ford is hard to knock over. He has remarkable lateral mobility for a man of his weight. And his "pad level" is naturally very low. Linemen are constantly being coached on getting their "pad level" lower. Ford has an advantage on that.

And all that got me wondering if maybe some of the "rules of thumb" used for evaluating players might be incomplete or just plain wrong. For example, maybe teams could be better served by dropping the height guideline for DTs and instead looking directly at things like arm length and weight.

I think Poona is very unique to have long long arm with short body and legs. Most shorter guys have short arms too?