At 34 years old and entering his 13th NFL season, Seahawks left tackle Duane Brown is the unquestioned leader of Seattle’s rebuilt offensive line.
The team lost three starters from last year’s team – Justin Britt, D.J. Fluker and Germain Ifedi – as well as sixth lineman/tight end George Fant.
Mike Iupati is the only starter re-joining Brown in 2020, and he will have to compete with Phil Haynes to even get his old starting job back.
All this means Brown, who has taken on a leadership and mentorship role for the Seahawks the past three years, has his work cut out for him – not just with a plethora of new faces, but with a global pandemic making it far more difficult for him to impart his wisdom and help build team chemistry ahead of Week 1.
“Good offensive line play, a major factor is chemistry and continuity,” Brown told reporters over Zoom on Wednesday. “We lost a big chunk of our starting pieces this offseason. We’ve got some new faces, we’ve got some guys who have been in the system, we’ve got some guys who haven’t been here, so just getting to learn each other, learning the terminology, communication, just learning how we do stuff here, all of that stuff is important.”
“I’m doing what I can now, virtually, over texts, phone calls, just to try to build as much chemistry as possible until we’re able to meet and physically go on the field and do stuff,” Brown continued. “Once that happens, we’ll have a small window to try to build each other up as much as possible until the season starts… I’m going to do what I can to try to fill them in as much as possible on what to expect when it’s time to go.”
Most of the offensive line positions are wide open at this point, although free agent pickups B.J. Finney and Brandon Shell are expected to start at center and right tackle, respectively, with third round pick Damien Lewis expected to replace Fluker at right guard.
The team has plenty of others who will fight for starting jobs as well, including Joey Hunt, Ethan Pocic, Chance Warmack, Cedric Ogbuehi, and Jordan Simmons – among others.
Brown is working hard to help the young guys who are new to the team, since they have not had an opportunity to work on the field during either rookie minicamps or OTA’s, which has hampered their development and ability to learn the playbook.
“For the young guys who haven’t been a part of this team, I’m doing my best just to try to talk to them to tell them what to expect,” Brown continued. “We’re going over our playbooks, any questions that anyone has, I’m answering for them. Whenever we’re up and going, we just have to try to shorten the learning curve as much as possible to get that continuity. Again, we have a lot of guys that were in the system last year, so it probably won’t be as drastic as it seems. But it still takes a little bit of time just to get that going, and OTAs and minicamp and things like that are essential. We’ll make it happen.”
The Seahawks made a lot of changes to their offensive line, but it remains to be seen how exactly the unit will come together in 2020 – and it may be a while until we can see them all together on the field.
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