I’m not an expert, but there’s some semi-convincing explanations. First, they’re all bad athletes. Volson is actually the best by RAS and he’s the worst of them all. Our tackles are okay in a vacuum but each have clear weaknesses: OBJ is slow as hell (and possibly is playing through injury the last couple weeks) and Jonah is undersized. When they lose, they lose bad. Karras has been okay the last few games, but Cappa has been awful even though he was actually good last year. On the coaching side, it seems like they’re teaching the iOL to compress in pass pro which inevitably leaves Burrow with a tiny pocket with little room for error and little room to escape. Ultimately, it’s a low-upside line with suspect coaching where it’s pretty likely someone will screw up on any given play even if 4/5 of them are individually about average.

I love CJ, and I could be wrong, but it doesn’t seem like he gets the ball out very fast. His protection has been pretty good, somehow; he’s 5th in the league in time to throw, and based just on the Bengals game, we didn’t really pressure him at all. Believe it or not, he even had a negative CPOE while torching us, which is more of an indictment of our defense than anything. I agree though that Collins, Brown, and Dell all look great and that’s in no small part thanks to his accuracy.