The Raiders made several surprising moves this week, including trading away defensive tackle Neil Farrell Jr. and releasing Matthew Butler. But one of the most surprising moves was the release of starting guard Alex Bars.
In a recent article by Gary Davenport of Bleacher Report, he named nine players that NFL teams might end up regretting that they cut on Tuesday. One of those players was Bars, who was cut by the Raiders despite starting 14 games with the team last season.
In fairness to the Raiders, cutdown day is always a numbers game; teams can only keep so many players at a given position. However, Bars is not an end-of-the bench player who barely saw the field last season.
He played over 850 snaps for the Raiders in 2022. He wasn’t great (five sacks allowed, per PFF), but he could have been an experienced depth piece at least. And given how bad the Raiders’ offensive line is, the team can use all of those it can get.
One of the reasons why the Raiders were comfortable cutting Bars was due to the play of Greg Van Roten. He thoroughly outplayed Bars in camp and during the preseason to the point that it wasn’t much of a competition.
But it’s hard to find quality offensive line depth and Bars was a starter last year. Will they wind up regretting moving on from him this offseason? That remains to be seen, but the Raiders believe in their offensive line depth and do have several options to protect themselves if Van Roten struggles at right guard.
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