Now that the draft is over and Scott Pioli hasn't drafted an OT, I thought I might answer all the "experts" out there who thought he would go OT in the first round. The answer? We don't have any problems on the O-line. Not anymore at least. Listed below are some stats on where exactly all the sacks last year came from. I've found a better site now and have updated the numbers to the end of season total.

http://www.profootballfocus.com/by_player.php?tab=by_player&season=2009&page=4&surn=S&playerid=1393

Now let's take out the players that were cut and replace them with the player who was picked up in the offseason to replace them.

Note: I replaced Wade Smith's stats with Asamoah's college total last season. The same with Thomas Jones but with last year's stats.

While most of these numbers came from Albert and O'Callaghan, they are young and started to show promising signs in the second half of the year. Pioli decided he'd see what Albert and O'Callaghan can do with a year's experience in the Zone Blocking Scheme. He then went to the next trouble spot, the RG position, replacing six sacks to one. The one being Ryan Lilja. He then replaced Wade Smith's 5 sacks with Jon Asamoah's 3.

On paper that's 7 fewer hits on Matt Cassel. But we could also do a lot better than that. Albert will improve and reduce his amount of sacks. So will O'Callaghan. This total could easily get as low as 15. Also considering Pioli didn't spend big to make these improvements says a lot about Pioli's expertise as a GM. Spending small but getting good reward.

This, with the improvement to the WR corps, we should see Cassel and the entire offence have a great year in 2010.