In case you missed it: Part One
We went through a bunch of stats, but maybe the best way to settle who, among Iowa and Wisconsin, develops the best NFL offensive linemen is to simply rank those linemen based on their eventual performance. Sure, it's a subjective measure leading to a subjective conclusion, but when did that ever stop us? Ranking things is fun!
Guys Who Don't Count
Wisconsin
NR: Ryan Ramczyk (2017 pick #32)
Ramczyk's pro career is six days old, and while he'll surely move up this list in the future, we don't have any data to base a ranking on yet.
Guys Who Never Played
Iowa
T-29: Pete McMahon (2005 pick #214)
T-29: Mike Elgin (2007 pick #247)
T-29: Kyle Calloway (2010 pick #216)
Wisconsin
T-29: Ben Johnson (2003 #216)
Guys Who Played in One Game
25. Ben Sobieski, Iowa (2003 #151)
That's (1) not the best start for Iowa, and (2) understandable, given the number of sixth- and seventh-round picks used on Iowa offensive linemen. Of those five players, only Ben Sobieski played in an NFL game. He played in one. He's the Moonlight Graham of Iowa offensive linemen.
Guys Who Played a Bit More than Moonlight Graham
24. Bill Nagy, Wisconsin (2011 #252)
23. Bruce Nelson, Iowa (2003 #50)
Nelson is the first player inside the first three rounds to appear on our list; he played in twelve games and made one start after being drafted in the second round in 2003. Normally, that would signal a player that could skew the statistics, particularly money, beyond their play. But Nelson was drafted fourteen years ago, when the money for draftees wasn't so exorbitant.
22. Julian Vandervelde, Iowa (2011 #161)
21. Adam Gettis, Iowa (2012 #141)
20. Seth Olsen, Iowa (2009 #132)
This isn't going so well so far. Might have been a bad idea.
19. Austin Blythe, Iowa (2016 #248)
18. John Moffitt, Wisconsin (2011 #75)
17. Andrew Donnal, Iowa (2015 #119)
16. Dan Buenning, Wisconsin (2005 #107)
If you extrapolate Blythe's and Donnal's first few seasons over four hypothetical years, they fall right about here. Blythe is stuck behind Ryan Kelly in Indianapolis, which limits his opportunities (he has one career start at this point), while Donnal is a backup with the Rams at the moment.
15. Peter Konz, Wisconsin (2012 #55)
14. Gabe Carimi, Wisconsin (2011 #29)
Next are two Badgers who were gone from the league too early. Konz made 28 starts in his first three years before knee problems forced him out of football. Carimi, who won the 2010 Outland Trophy, was one of the top linemen taken in the 2011 Draft and received a contract commensurate with that selection. But the Bears offloaded him to Tampa for a sixth-round pick after just two seasons, and he was out of the league after four years and $6.5 million in earnings. Probably the biggest "bust" on this list.
13. Al Johnson, Wisconsin (2003 #38)
12. Rob Havenstein, Wisconsin (2015 #57)
11. Ricky Wagner, Wisconsin (2013 #168)
Here comes the Wisconsin run, a whole bunch of serviceable NFL linemen taken in the second round. Johnson logged 45 starts in nine seasons with the Cowboys, Cardinals and Dolphins. Havenstein, who has 28 starts in two season, and Wagner both are building successful NFL careers. Wagner just signed a gargantuan contract to replace Riley Reiff in Detroit.
The Good-to-Great
T-9. Kevin Zeitler, Wisconsin (2012 #27)
T-9. Riley Reiff, Iowa (2012 #23)
It's fitting that these two, taken just four picks apart in 2012, are so close on just about every metric. Reiff has five more career appearances; Zeitler has one more career start. Zeitler just signed a five-year, $60 million deal with Cleveland; Reiff got $58.7 million over the same five years from the Vikings. If both play the full term of those contracts, they will each have roughly the same career earnings, though Reiff might make up the small difference with playoff bonuses [Ed. note -- Skol Vikings, baby.] Zeitler and Reiff are indistinguishable, and so they're tied.
8. Kraig Urbik, Wisconsin (2009 #79)
7. Bryan Bulaga, Iowa (2010 #23)
Urbik was selected one year before Bulaga and has appeared in more games (he made is 100th career appearance last season), but Bulaga has a season's worth of extra starts over Urbik and doesn't look like he's slowing down. Bulaga has made more money, and this is the pros, so that matters. In total, Bulaga holds an ever-so-slight edge.
The All-Timers
6. Brandon Scherff, Iowa (2015 #5)
After two seasons in the league, Scherff has one thing that nobody above him on the list has: A Pro Bowl appearance. That, and the fact that he's already (1) made $15.6 million and (2) established that he's not a bust, put him above many of the seasoned pros earlier in this list. Scherff already has more career starts than Carimi, Moffit, Konz or Buenning, all of whom had longer careers. He's already made more money than all but seven players on this list. And he's done it in two years. He could well end up second on this list before it's all done.
5. Robert Gallery, Iowa (2004 #2)
$60 million. Robert Gallery, the NFL's Next Great Offensive Tackle turned phenomenal interior lineman, made more than all but one player on this list during his career. A big chunk of that is due to being picked second on the basis of his title as The NFL's Next Great Offensive Tackle, a princeship that never materialized into an actual throne. But, to Gallery's credit, he remade himself rather than fade away, and was able to extend his career for nine seasons and 103 starts. He's second in earnings, fourth in starts and appearances, and first in "what might have been" retrospectives that ignore the solid career he had.
4. Travis Frederick, Wisconsin (2013 #31)
Dallas took some heat from the rest of the league when it reached for the third-round-graded Frederick at the end of the first round four years ago. Jerry Jones can go full-on Drew Pearson on those haters now. Frederick has made 64 starts in four seasons, a full 16 starts per campaign, and picked up three All-Pro awards and three Pro Bowls in the process. He's the best young center in the league. The only knock: He's a center, which is going to keep his earnings fairly modest.
3. Eric Steinbach, Iowa (2003 #24)
Steinbach is second in career earnings from Iowa offensive linemen, but he remains the first Kirk Ferentz NFL success story. Ten seasons in the league, 124 starts, one Pro Bowl appearance, and nearly $43 million in the bank. He remains the standard by which a career as an NFL interior lineman can be judged, a consummate professional who showed competence and longevity. He's only passed on this list because one interior lineman has done more.
2. Marshal Yanda, Iowa (2007 #86)
Yanda, an unheralded JUCO transfer when he arrived in Iowa City in 2005, is now arguably the best offensive lineman in the league and has been for half a decade. He has now made 133 career starts, and has started all but five games for the Ravens over the last seven seasons. He's now 32, and arguably better than he's ever been, and there's no sign he's slowing down. Marshal Yanda has always been the ultimate late bloomer, a trait that continues now.
Also, this gives us an opportunity to show this:
1. Joe Thomas, Wisconsin (2007 #3)
He's the gold standard at the NFL's premiere offensive line position, so good that he's won nine All-Pro Team spots in ten seasons despite playing for the Browns. He has 160 starts in those ten seasons, essentially a perfect record, and has been named to the Pro Bowl in each of those seasons. He's the only player on this list to top $100 million in career earnings. You can argue that Iowa has put more good-to-great offensive linemen in the NFL. You can argue that the current best linemen in the league is a Hawkeye. You can't argue with Thomas's career, though.
The Conclusion
You can take away what you will from those rankings; with the large number of current pros in the mix, there are certainly places to disagree. But the takeaway is fairly obvious. Six of the top ten are former Hawkeyes; four are Badgers. All of those top ten were drafted in the top three rounds, and there are remarkably few late-round picks who had careers of significance. As we previously discussed, Iowa has more draft picks, but many of those draft picks are in the last few rounds, where the odds of catching on with an NFL team become low. And that has to be considered in discounting the value of the sheer number of Iowa draft picks.
However, Iowa has also put more players in the early rounds, and Iowa players have, on the whole, had more successful careers if chosen out of those spots than Wisconsin players have. The differences between the players listed between 13 and 7 -- overwhelmingly Badgers -- are fairly small. The differences between those players and the top six are easier to spot, and those decade-long careers or All-Pro accolades have essentially gone to a pair of Badgers and a handful of Hawkeyes. The bottom Iowa guys have left earlier than the bottom Badgers, but the Hawkeyes drafted early have had, on the whole, better careers than their Wisconsin counterparts.
Put another way, if you were building a two-deep from the last fifteen years of Iowa and Wisconsin offensive linemen, it would probably look like this:
LT: Joe Thomas, Kevin Zeitler
LG: Eric Steinbach, Robert Gallery
C: Travis Frederick, Al Johnson
RG: Marshal Yanda, Brandon Scherff
RT: Bryan Bulaga, Riley Reiff
That's three Iowa starters and three Iowa backups. That's also one hell of an offensive line, which shows just how close this comparison is. But three is more than two, and I'm prepared to declare victory.
Comments are open. Have at it.
