Did Byron Pringle save our season?

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by ChiTown

Yep

He's 32 years old, and has been playing an average of about 17 games per year (including playoffs). He gets the really tough assignments over the middle taking a pounding game after game. That shit eventually catches up to you. I'm absolutely amazed at how resilient and consistent he has been over his career. Dude is a bit of a freak.

I mentioned it after I watched the Aaron Hernandez documentary. The shots these TEs take are just unreal.

I'm not going to excuse anything Hernandez did - guy was all about that life as far back as High School and I don't think football turned him into who he became. But man, watching that documentary and the dozen or so clips they showed of him over the middle - plays that seem benign from TV are just absolute trainwrecks for those guys.

They're in that unhappy middle where they're moving fast enough to generate momentum but not fast enough to get into space. And invariably TEs are big men getting hit by other big men at fairly high speeds.

I can't think of a position that takes the kind of abuse those guys take. And the ones that are able to just keep ticking like Kelce and Tony Gonzalez just amaze the hell out of me. Even a tank like Gronk seemed to always miss a game or two a year simply through getting the shit beat out of them. But Kelce just keeps chugging along, averaging right at 90% of his teams offensive snaps over the 7 years since he's become a full-time starter. That's awfully impressive.

The league sees guys like George Kittle have huge years then struggle to stay healthy and duplicate that every few years. Guys like Zach Ertz come and go all the time. But guys like Kelce, Tony G, Greg Olson and Jason Witten are pretty rare birds. The game's designed to grind guys like that into a fine powder but some of them just refuse to sit down.