FanPost

When do guards begin to decline?


Ed raised the question in today's mailbag that he is concerned that Kevin Zeitler (age 30, 9th season) may have begun to regress (but with the qualifier that it is too early to know for sure). Let's put some numbers on that. Here are Zeitler's PFF grades for each year from 2012 up to 2020 thus far:

Zeitler: 75.2, 76.2, 88.0, 79.9, 83.3, 73.2, 77.2, 76.4, 64.8

So Zeitler has been an above average player for his entire career, and arguably an excellent player for 3 years. To add some context, he played for Cincinnati his first 5 years and the Bengals were a playoff team the first 4 of those years. Since then he has been on losing teams, some of them terrible (2017 Browns, 2019 and 2020 Giants). So was his great play in years 3-4-5 partly a function of being on a good team? 2020 is clearly his worst to date, but it's only 3 games, so we'll see.

For context, here are the scores for the other most notable guards drafted in 2012:

David DeCastro: 58.1, 81.5, 79.2, 84.2, 83.0, 90.0, 74.8, 71.0, 63.4

Brandon Brooks: 71.5, 87.6, 85.3, 77.9, 82.4, 85.0, 78.1, 92.8, 0 (injured)

DeCastro shows a similar career arc to Zeitler, with something of a decline from his peak years into 2020 thus far but a more sustained period of excellence in the middle years (and with the advantage of being on a good team much of that time and with a single head coach). Brooks does also except that last year was his best ever and there is no sign of decline (he has been on a mediocre to good team most of this career).

So it is plausible that Kevin Zeitler has begun to regress. But Brooks shows that this does not have to be the case.

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