A Midseason Look At The Young Core Offense

To build a team through the draft means to build a nucleus of young players and allow them to mature and gain experience through rotation during the season.  You need to find youth which is talented enough to get into a positional rotation or youth which can develop on the coverage teams and find it's way into the rotation later.

Knowing this, it makes sense to find draft needs by looking at the young core of players instead of the current starting lineup.  If the starting lineup has a need, free agency is probably the right place to look since experience is needed immediately.  In the case of the 2010 Tampa Bay Buccaneers young players need more experience (i.e. the rebuilding process means creating depth across the board).  The status of the rebuilding process can also be measured by looking at the young core.

To build this chart of the Young Core Offense, I took the most recent Buccaneers team depth chart and roster (both of which have been a moving target all year) and placed all the offensive players with four years of experience or less (because the average NFL player has a 3.5 year career).  I ignored players on the practice squad as they are under a less-binding contract structure.  This provides a glimpse of the "core" of the offense (players listed in order of years of NFL experience):

XWR:  Spurlock, Micheal (3 years NFL Experience); Williams, Mike (0 years/Rookie)
QB:  Johnson, Josh (3); Freeman, Josh (2); Carpenter, Rudy (2)

RB:  Huggins, Kareem (1, IR); Blount, LeGarrette (0)

FB:  Lumpkin, Kregg (2)

YWR:  Stroughter, Sammie (2); Benn, Arrelious (0); Parker, Preston (0)

TE:  Purvis, Ryan (1); Lorig, Erik (0)

RT:  Lee, James (3); Hardman, Derek (0)

RG: 

C:  Zuttah, Jeremy (3)
LG:  Larsen, Ted (0)

LT:  Dotson, Demar (2, IR); Barker, Will (0)

LS:  

P:  Malone, Robert(0)

With the recent influx of offensive line players due to a rash of injuries, this chart looks much healthier.

We'll use this chart for out analysis of the Tampa Bay Buccaneer needs for the 2011 NFL Draft.