My Bears vs Browns Offensive Notes

I have been watching them all year.

Braxton Jones has been on record multiple times last season and this season - stating his greatest challenge is improving his technique.  That is the mountain he is climbing.  It is the same mountain that Wright is beginning to climb.  It takes time.  For an offensive lineman at the NFL level it is infinitely more difficult than lifting weights in a gym.  Nowadays it reminds me of some high-level martial arts being executed by 320 pound professional athletes who (in the case of NFL tackles) have unreal speed/quickness/strength - and these are also very smart players.  They are the full-package.  David, it is a huge transition from college ball.  It takes time.  Bean counting the sacks/hurries etc their rookie year isn't the full story on who they will be in a year or two.  It is just not that simple.  And one last thing.  He does not have slow feet.  He does need to improve his footwork (just as QB's need to work on footwork, so do tackles).  It is a process of learning and improving his technique.

Even reaction times can be improved to some extent.  You can't improve simple reaction times but complex reaction times can be.  We studied this at Northwestern University (I'm dating myself here) almost 50 years ago.  I was a law enforcement officer for 30 or so years, and for most of those years I was a traffic accident reconstruction person.  I had a team of people who responded to the more serious vehicle accidents in our county - and sometimes we were asked to assist other agencies in other jurisdictions (catastrophic type accidents involving multiple deaths).  I actually trained at Northwestern back then with some of the investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board who investigated aircraft accidents.  One of the things we studied there was reaction time responses.  I won't go into it all here but it boils down to the fact that a person can improve complex reactions times.  Relating this to an NFL player's quickness to respond in game play situations, a player can improve reaction time responses at a certain level.  One example would be a QB mentally processing what he sees and his response time to that.  We talk about it as "the game slowing down" for a new QB at some point and the QB processes/responds more quickly.  This is something that all players at all positions can improve upon... it is a complex reaction time response.  We are talking about near instant times here of .75 of a second or a fraction more than that.  We did some experiments on this simple/complex reaction time - it is a "real thing" that can be measured.  Can a QB, or OL improve this reaction time?  Sure.  How much?  It depends on each person.  And technique for an offensive lineman is a huge area where they can improve hand and footwork.  That is a "real thing" too.  Players can get better and we translate that as being quicker as they move to block better.  I'll just leave it at that.