If you are a fan of pre-season player rankings, you might want to look away. Pro Football Focus ranked the 32 starting centers heading into the 2021 season and of course, Rodney Hudson finished at No. 1.
But where did the new center for the Las Vegas Raiders Andre James show up on the list? Well, as you can assume from the title of this article, not very high. The site listed him as the No. 32 starting center in the NFL, mostly due to a lack of experience. But they didn’t love what they saw when he was on the field, either.
Here is Ben Linsey of Pro Football Focus discussing the new center for the Raiders going into the 2021 season:
“The Raiders are showing a lot of faith in James. He’s not only the man to beat at center over a proven starter in Nick Martin, but the Raiders also made him a top-20 center by average money per year this offseason without him having any kind of NFL success to point to. James has played 117 offensive snaps over the past two years, with nearly all of those coming in two starts back in 2019. He earned a 1.9 pass-blocking grade during that rookie season.”
The Raiders, and the other veteran offensive linemen, are optimistic about James and his chances of replacing Hudson this season. The team is certainly taking a leap of faith here, but they believe he can be an average center, at worst, right away.
While the Raiders have every right to feel that way, the fact is that not many teams have a worse center situation heading into the season than Las Vegas. How this eventually plays out for James and the Raiders could be a deciding factor on how their season goes this year.
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