The NFL’s most box-office player today is … an offensive tackle? | Oliver Connolly

Saquon Barkley is leaping over defenders. Fred Warner is hitting everything in sight. Wherever you look, Lamar Jackson is slinging fire. And yet the best show going in the NFL through 10 weeks is one of the big guys up front: Lions right tackle Penei Sewell.

It can be easy to miss tackles. They do a lot of their best work in the shadows. Like a good official, if you can get through a game without noticing them, without a commentator saying their name, you know they’ve done their primary job of keeping a quarterback upright. But Sewell has ascended to box-office status as the Lions rip their way through the league.

Even as the league becomes more sophisticated, there is still a simple beauty in watching a lineman skip, pull and race out into the open field – and no lineman is as destructive on the move as Sewell. He is a screener extraordinaire, and the best pulling tackle in the NFL. He is the rare lineman who can turn the sport into a spectacle.

Jared Goff may be the Lions’ most important player, but Sewell is the team’s best. The Lions feed off their rushing attack, and Sewell serves as Detroit’s alpha and omega in the run game. Two years on from being the youngest starting tackle in league history, Sewell has rounded into the most imposing blocker in the league. Whether digging people up in the trenches or galloping out into space, Sewell is laying waste to all before him. At times, you don’t know whether to wince at the collisions or weld your eyes open, Clockwork Orange-style, so that you don’t miss a single step. He has reached a point where smaller defenders are leaping off his way in the open field, as if he brings actual death and terror, sometimes crashing into their teammates to avoid the big man delivering a clean strike.

The Lions know they’re dealing with something special. Coaches are fond of the axiom “players not plays”. In critical moments, they ditch their carefully calibrated plan and look to force-feed a touch to their star. Ordinarily, that means drawing up something to the team’s best-receiving threat. No matter the coverage, they’re banking on their best player to win. But for the Lions, that player is their nimble giant.

Last week, with the Lions in a 10-point hole on the road in Houston, they turned to Sewell. On third-and-long late in the third quarter, with the Texans having a shot to ice the game, Detroit’s offensive coordinator, Ben Johnson, put the game in the hands and feet of his tackle.

Hoo boy. There is Sewell, a 6ft 5inch, 335lbs lineman, leading the charge on a screen play … and keeping pace with one of the league’s most explosive running backs. He starts by dropping an edge defender to the floor before darting out into space to seal a Texans defender, opening up a corridor for running back Jahmyr Gibbs. But his work isn’t finished there. Sewell keeps churning, matching Gibbs stride for stride and mopping up a third Texan to allow Gibbs to gain an extra couple of yards.

Johnson kept things rolling in the red zone. Needing a touchdown to pull within striking distance, the Lions doubled down on their strategy: put Sewell in space.

Simmer down, big fella!

The NFL has had a surge in ultra-athletic offensive linemen in the past five years. Hot-shot play-callers are finding new, creative ways to get those players involved in as many actions as possible. Yet even in a league full of one-percenters, Sewell lives in a world of his own. It has the feel of prime Shaq about it. How can someone so big be so much more athletic than everyone else?

It’s enough for Goff, a player who faced Aaron bleeping Donald every day in practice early in his career, to say Sewell is as good as he has seen. “He might be the best athlete in the league,” Goff said earlier this season. “Pound for pound, you find somebody that runs like that, that can move like that, that has a little bit of wiggle like he has. He’s as good as I’ve ever seen.”

The Lions weaponize Sewell’s athleticism in ways that would make even Kyle Shanahan and Trent Williams blush, pulling out every trick to feature the tackle. In 2022, to close out a tight game against the Vikings, Detroit turned to their star lineman to be their go-to receiver. In a blowout win against the Cowboys earlier this season, they again looked to Sewell in the passing game, drawing up a hook-and-ladder play designed to get Sewell dancing in the endzone. If not for a flag, it would have been Sewell’s first receiving touchdown. His movement in the run game, screen game and as a potential pass-catcher inspires paranoia in a defense, making life easier for Goff when he drops back to throw.

The side dishes are tasty. But the main course is Sewell blasting people off the ball. There has been a nearly 18% increase in running plays league-wide this season. No team has bought into the shift more than the Lions. And no individual run play has been more successful this season than a running back scooting behind Sewell. On runs targeted behind Sewell this season, 52.5% have gone for a first down or touchdown, according to Pro Football Focus. No other Lions lineman sniffs the 40% mark and only one other tackle in the league, Denver’s Garett Bolles, has crossed the 45% threshold. You can count on one hand the number of tackles in recent league history who have been a walking first down.

All the focus on his brilliance in the run game can obscure (a little) Sewell’s excellence in pass protection. He is explosive out of his stance, catching the corner before an edge-rusher can carve open a path to the quarterback. Try to run through his chest, and he will shut down even the strongest bull-rushers. Even at his size, he can shuffle his feet with the best of them. The only answer to getting around Sewell at this point, it seems, is to embrace sorcery.