Having an early round buy is not in our favor if the injuries keep happening. Our schedule is pretty tough on the home stretch. Our WR group looks good with enough weapons to survive some injuries, our defense looks good and healthy with some decent depth from what I saw in the preseason. Our OL with Ifedi back will function just fine, but lacks depth. Injuries here could really hurt us because it could lead to injuries to our QB and our RB group.
As with any team, depth is important and can be the deciding factor to making and being successful in the postseason. We need to have focus righ now in the backups to our OL starters and really focus a lot of coaching and scouting resources here. This will not only help us this season, but building our depth at OL is paramount to success as we tend not to pay OL to stick around, so you have to have a turnstile development program.
If we can stick to and make standard more of a spread offense this will help a lot to minimize OL injuries. The NFL has really put an emphasis on defensive lines, and there are a lot of good rushers out there. College, running a lot of spread, hasn't been turning out many quality offensive linemen suited for the NFL, so a team who is good at developing them a year or two ahead of time from within will be really the only way to guarantee having a servicable line. If we continue making the playoffs and winning, our first round picks will be late, and as history has shown, possibly traded for multiple later round. With good OL guys being sparse in the draft, you might not get any close to being starters that make it past the first round.
So, while very early, it will be tough going to get first seed with being thin at OL as far as depth and an early buy week. The good news is the rest of the team is looking VERY potent (for 1 game atleast) and has a history of grinding out wins. It will take a lot of heart to get it.
