NFL Draft Week Takes: Tyler Linderbaum
- Jake Hunter
- Apr 21, 2022
- 2 min read
In this series, I will be sharing my opinions about the upcoming NFL Draft (lots of these will likely be heard on our podcasts as well).
Tyler Linderbaum Should Not Be Drafted In the Top 38 Picks
When was the last time you heard of an NFL team winning a Super Bowl because their center had short arms?
Never?
I'm not surprised. In the modern NFL, the center position is fairly low in value, as it is typically a position that can be played adequately by a lot of NFL athletes. While it obviously takes high-level athleticism to play any position in the NFL (besides long-snapper), centers are easier to fill with a low-cost option without outrageous drop-off in performance.
Couple that with the fact that far and away the most important aspect of a center's skillset is the length of their arms (and literally nothing else matters.
This brings me to today's topic: Iowa's Tyler Linderbaum.
Sure, you may have heard that he's a "generational" talent at the center position. Proponents of Linderbaum cite his "dominance" in college and his "special combination of tenacity, aggression, intelligence, and mobility". Who cares about those kinds of things when his arms were measured at 31 and 1/8 inches long, some of the shortest in recent NFL Combine history?
At this point, one has to wonder if he could even block a child on the gridiron.
It's because of this that my current take is that Tyler Linderbaum is not worthy of a top-38 pick, and that everyone picking in that range should avoid wasting a pick on a player whose arms are so incredibly short.
I'm just doing my best to help save these franchises from making a horrific mistake.
I think one of the teams, at least one, with picks 10-38 should try to build their future by exchanging their picks with a team that has a history of building a franchise by exchanging all of their high draft picks. This strategy could net them a player like a certain future Hall-of-Famer named Mitchell.