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Northwestern offensive linemen tackle 6 myths about the position

For a perennial dark horse like Northwestern football to keep its cool in the Big Ten, it helps to have its offensive line setting the tone.

During the Wildcats’ 2015 training camp, right guard Shane Mertz took that approach literally when he was trying to get some shuteye at the team hotel in Wisconsin.

“I’m sitting in my room and I’m sweating as I’m trying to go to sleep,” said the graduate student, who started as an engineering major but eventually earned a bachelor’s in economics. “I’m like, these air conditioners won’t let us go down below 74 degrees. I’m looking at it, and I figure there’s probably a way to override this. I’m fiddling around with it, going through some root menu stuff, and eventually I find the minimum cool setting and figure out the way to drop the minimum cool.

“Just my suite is very happy at first; then word’s getting around that I know how to do this. Next thing I know I have coaches coming up to me essentially every day asking me how to override the air conditioning.”

Such an anecdote might seem out of the ordinary for anyone who thinks offensive linemen are, well, a bunch of blockheads.

So with the help of a handful of Wildcats, RedEye set out to address common assumptions regarding these literal giants in their field. We took six statements often assigned to these athletes and rated them as false, mostly false, mostly true or true.

Mertz was joined in a recent conversation by redshirt sophomore Tommy Doles, redshirt sophomore Blake Hance, redshirt junior Brad North and redshirt senior Eric Olson.

You might never look at them the same way.

They’re all a bunch of meatheads.

False

Let’s put this to rest immediately.

“People have a preset mindset that someone who’s really big and athletic can’t really be smart too,” Mertz said. “Everyone on our offensive line completely disproves that, if you look at all of our grades, all of our majors. If I’m looking at relatively on the football team, I can confidently say the offensive line is the smartest position group. … Football players in general, the amount of things we need to process and handle on a play-by-play basis would blow most people’s minds.”

From the moment a play is called in the huddle, offensive linemen have to know their own assignment as well as those of everyone in the unit. Those assignments can all change depending on how the defense lines up. Then they have to communicate what they see to their teammates.

Preparation is paramount, naturally. Hance estimated that the unit spends about eight hours per week watching film with coaches, which doesn’t include the amount of studying each man puts in on his own.

In addition to being willing to share …

“We always say, ‘If somebody takes [the player you were supposed to block], take theirs,’ ” Olson said. “So if you have a certain assignment and the defense didn’t quite line up the way you thought or they hid it in a way you didn’t think they were going to, then somebody takes the guy you thought you were going to block, and you have to know the whole scheme to know where he was going.”

… they have their own ways of communicating …

“Every assignment has its own call,” Olson said. “So if we’re running inside zone [a running play], the two guys on the back side [the side opposite where the running back intends to go] are going to have a double team on the down defensive lineman or linebacker, and we have a call for that. So we’d say ‘solid’ for that; we’d say that to the guy next to you. The center has a call for that play, and we’re all yelling to each other what our call is.”

… and it’s not always with words.

“Sometimes when we have to convey messages to the quarterback and running back, then we have certain hand signals, where we slap our butt or point or something like that to let the quarterback or running back know where we’re going,” Olson said. “Sometimes you can’t even get words out and you just go ‘rah!’ and that lets you know they’re running a twist on a pass play.”

They eat whatever they want.

Mostly false

Considerable portions of food are a necessity when you weigh 300 pounds and burn enormous amounts of calories. However, that doesn’t mean junk food dominates the dinner table.

“Our nutritionist says [we should maintain an] 80-20 [ratio]—80 percent of the time you should be eating good stuff, and 20 percent of the time you can splurge on other stuff,” Olson said.

Doles said, “[Team trainers] talk about the makeup of our plates we know we need to get protein, carbs, vegetables, fruits, and [exactly what we eat] might depend whether it’s post-workout or pre-workout because it does have to be good food. We can’t just eat Doritos to get to 300 pounds; we still have to be able to move.”

There are exceptions, such as celebrating the end of training camp in August.

“[Last week] we had a rule where the offensive linemen had to spend over $20 at Portillo’s,” Olson said. “Some guys racked up $30 bills of chili cheese dogs and double burgers.”

They’re not in shape.

False

While offensive linemen are not going to outrun wide receivers, that’s partly because 40-yard dashes are not vital to their performance.

“We do a lot more functional conditioning where we’re pushing sleds for a short amount of time, bursting off and get right back on and do it again to simulate an actual football environment instead of just getting on the line and running back and forth because it’s not something that we ever have to do,” Olson said.

Keep in mind that members of the offensive line play almost every offensive snap; many positions can’t say that.

“[The opponents’] body language is a big indicator of how we’re kicking their butts pretty much,” North said. “So if they have their hands on their hips or are hunched over it’s usually a pretty good sign for us that we just have to keep getting after them and the breaking point’s almost there.”

There’s a reason they spend a lot of time in the weight room, too.

“Offensive line is one of the positions where you see a direct translation between lifting weights and performance on the field,” Hance said. “If you can’t bench press very much weight, then you’re not gonna be able to push a guy very hard.”

They don’t care about stats.

Mostly true

Good luck finding an offensive lineman who craves the spotlight. Deferring to teammates is part of the deal when you know you’ll likely never carry the ball into the end zone. So it’s more about being a focal point for the team’s confidence.

“There’s usually a direct correlation as to how well we’re doing to how well the offense is doing. You can kind of tell,” North said. “If the offense is moving and chugging along, I don’t want to say it’s a product of [only] us, but everything starts and usually ends with us.”

Although O-linemen are graded by their coaches after each game, evaluating them isn’t as straightforward as looking at passing yards for a quarterback or tackles for a linebacker.

“The stats we take pride in are sacks, [as in we] make sure there’s no sacks, and rushing yards,” Hance said.

“If we get a lot of rushing yards that game, we feel like we did our job for the most part,” Olson said.

They like to hit people.

True

This one is dead on, actually.

“We do like to hit people all the time, but I’d say the common misconception is we’re a bunch of fat slobs who don’t know what to eat and don’t really take care of ourselves,” North said.

To a man, the NU linemen probably speak for all who play the position when they say they’re much more excited about running plays than passing calls. Why? Because charging forward and imposing your will on your opponent is preferable to retreating in pass protection.

“You hear [running] plays and it’s like oh, let’s go, bring it on,” Doles said. “You give a little fist pump because you know you’re going to come off the ball on the double team with one of your brothers, and that’s what we live for.

“Someone said the essence of offensive line is moving someone from Point A to Point B against their will. It’s being the aggressor; that’s kind of the mentality you take.”

They have no finesse to their game.

Mostly false

It’s easy to jump to this conclusion when you see a big man facedown on the grass after an attempted block. Consider what might have caused that fall, however.

“You see a lot of [smaller] guys juke out of the way at the last second, and we kind of look stupid and fall on our face when we try to block them,” Olson said. “If they stand still, we try to make them pay for it. They’re usually better athletes than us in space.”

Yet most of the time, blockers can’t execute without technique. Slowing down a 300-pound defensive lineman is never as simple as standing in his way.

“It would take someone trying to do it, I think, for them to understand as difficult as it really is,” Hance said. “Even if you play the position in high school, when you come to college there’s such a big learning curve of the fundamentals you have to learn because fundamentals are the most important thing and your technique when you’re playing offensive line. If your first step is wrong by 6 inches, you might get completely beat on the play.”

SEASON OPENERS

>> Western Michigan at Northwestern, 11 a.m. Saturday, ESPNU

>> Murray State at Illinois, 2:30 p.m. Saturday, BTN

>> Northern Illinois at Wyoming, 9:30 p.m. Saturday, CBS Sports

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