Penei Sewell is an elite NFL offensive tackle, not the 10th-best, as ESPN pundit Mike Clay ranked him. He finished third in pass protection efficiency at 98.2 with only two sacks, six hits, 11 hurries, and 19 total pressures allowed, plus a 95.1 overall and 96.7 run blocking grade from Pro Football Focus.
Is ESPN underrating Lions offensive tackle Penei Sewell?
Yes. Detroit Lions offensive tackle Penei Sewell ranks among the NFL’s best, not 10th. As Jeff Risdon noted, Pro Football Focus graded Sewell at 95.1 overall with a 96.7 run blocking grade, and he allowed just two sacks, six quarterback hits, 11 hurries, and 19 total pressures in 2025. Those results track with a 98.2 pass protection efficiency, which placed him third among qualifying tackles.
ESPN’s ranking leans on a proprietary pass block win rate and on the note that Sewell is moving sides. Risdon acknowledged that switching from right tackle to left tackle is a fair consideration, but he emphasized Sewell has played left tackle in the NFL and handled it well. Every visible performance marker says he belongs at the top tier.
Does pass block win rate measure what matters in protection?
No. What matters is not losing, and Sewell rarely loses. As Jeff Risdon said, the ESPN metric is subjective and measures “wins,” while pass protection success is about preventing losses. Sewell’s 98.2 efficiency shows he prevents losses as well as almost anyone, backed by only 19 total pressures conceded across a 50 percent of 1,294 snaps qualifier pool.
Context also matters. Protection can change based on a tight end’s alignment, the guard inside, or compensating for interior issues. Risdon pointed out that Detroit often had to shade inside last year because the center struggled, and Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff is not mobile under quick pressure. That reality affects how any tackle is scored snap to snap.
How should fans view the Detroit Lions offensive line at 19th?
As conservative. The unit projects better than 19th even with moving parts. Risdon accepted ESPN’s 19th as a defensible output for a formula, noting the Lions have starters at three new positions, but he stated Detroit will outperform that slot.
Continuity takes time, but the cornerstone is overwhelming. Sewell’s dominance stabilizes the front, and Detroit Lions offensive line coach Hank Fraley can lean on elite edge play while integrating the new starters. That foundation raises the floor and the ceiling for the group.
What do the comps say about other top NFL tackles?
They reinforce Sewell’s standing. In pass protection efficiency, Denver Broncos offensive tackle Garrett Bolles ranked first and New York Giants offensive tackle Andrew Thomas second, with Sewell third at 98.2. Pro Football Focus also showed Tampa Bay Buccaneers offensive tackle Tristan Wirfs at 92.7 overall, while Sewell’s pass protection grade of 80.3 matched San Francisco 49ers offensive tackle Trent Williams and topped San Francisco 49ers offensive tackle Colton McKivitz.
Risdon added that Sewell’s pressure totals were equivalent with Chicago Bears offensive tackle Darnell Wright, and he flagged Detroit Lions offensive tackle Larry Borom appearing in the top 10 for pass rush efficiency as an encouraging pickup. The eye test and the data converge on the same conclusion: Sewell is elite, and Detroit’s line trends up from a formulaic 19th.
#detroitlions #lions #detroitlionspodcast #peneisewell #espntackleranking #profootballfocus #darnellwright #pff #olrankings #lionsoffensiveline
Full episode transcript
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Speaker 4: Hey, everyone. Jeff Risen here with your daily DLP. We are back on a Monday, July 13. Took the weekend off. Wound up, being offline almost completely over the weekend, and it was great. Highly recommend that to everyone. Try it for at least a weekend that's rejuvenating for the soul. Had a lot of fun things going on and family time. But I did poke my head just a little bit too because I got messaged by a couple of different people about Mike Clay from ESPN and his offensive line rankings. And, Lions fans are quite rightly not too thrilled with Clay's assessment of the overall line, which I actually don't think he's too terribly off on, but on. And for those who missed it, and I'll bring up the tweet here from my friend Al Carsten who, race at, private Detroit. Al's a great guy. Good, info, gadfly type person. Got to meet him at training camp last year. Good dude. Really enjoy, interacting with with Al. And for those of you who are watching along on YouTube or this video version on Spotify, wherever you catch it at, that's great. You can see what I'm seeing here. If not, for those of you on the audio only version, first off, thank you again for subscribing, liking, and, following along. I understand that you can't always do that. Just as a point of reference, I watch, I'm friends with with Trevor Sikma and Connor Rogers and the NFL stock exchange. I have never actually watched their videos on YouTube. I just listened to them. It's perfectly okay to do that here too as well. But Al wrote, and I don't have the date on this. It happened over the weekend. Pene Sewell is a three time consecutive first team all pro. Mike Clay continues to project Sewell as just the NFL's tenth best offensive tackle and seventeenth best offensive lineman entering the season. Al also says he also projects the Detroit lines as only the NFL's nineteenth ranked offensive line. And like I said a little bit ago, I don't hate I'm not gonna hate on the fact that he has the lions at nineteenth because there's a lot of moving parts. We have starters at three new positions. Now one of them happens to be Pene Sewell. I think we'll be okay there, but that point's taken. Last year, they weren't good enough. I do think they're gonna be better than nineteenth, but look at that. That's okay. Move on from that one. But Pene Sewell is the tenth best offensive tackle. And in looking at Mike Clay's replies to angry, agitated Lions fans, and also, by the way, just people who watch offensive line in general, he has really harped up the fact that Penay has a poor pass block win rate, and he's moving from the right side to the left side. Moving sides is fair, although Pena has played quite a bit at left tackle in his NFL career and done pretty well there. The pass rush win rate is an interesting one because that is an ESPN proprietary statistic, and it is subjective. And the first thing that I will do is contrast it with Now is certainly not a perfect system, but I like the way they do it with offensive line play a little bit better because that will bring that up here. And that is this slide here. Blocking rates. They do this is at number one on their NFL of all tackles regardless of left or right, for, full time tackles. He's number one with an overall, grade of 95.1. Tristan Wirfs, great player, is second at 92.7 overall offense. Now go to the pass protection. And he does have an 80.3 grade that is lower than a lot of the guys below him. It's the same as Trent Williams. It's better than Colton McKibitz who is, I believe the second best right tackle listed here. All the other guys played left primarily. So but this is that's that's not the one I wanted. Let me go back to here. And instead of pass block win rates, they do efficiency. And efficiency ratings are more about how often do you lose. Because let's face it, as a pass protector, it doesn't matter if you win, you just can't lose.
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Speaker 4: Number one on that list is Garrett Ballas from the Denver Broncos, who, by the way, are their as Mike Clay's number one offensive line in that overall ranking offensive line, and I don't really have an issue with that. They're good. One of the reasons why they made it as far as they did last year. Andrew Thomas at second. K. I think some Giants fans might quibble a little bit with that, but he's a good player. No doubt about it. Third in pro football focus, pass rush or pass protection efficiency rankings amongst all tackles who played at least, the qualifiers up here at the top, 50% of 1,294 snaps. So that's 650 snaps roughly. Six forty seven as I do the math in my head. Kinda problem myself for getting that, actually. It's probably wrong now that I say it that way. Penasil is third at a 98.2 clip. So he might not be winning, but he ain't losing. And the stats from Now, again, these are proprietary stats. I will say, as a disclosure, I did go through their training program a decade ago. So I know how they score a line. I know exactly what they're looking for in pluses and minuses. They probably have tweaked it a little bit, but in principle, I understand how they grade. I don't understand ESPN's subjective grading metric, especially now that Mike Clay has used it to get on Penay. But let's just let's look at the numbers here. So gave up two sacks last year, six quarterback hits, 11 quarterback hurries, 19 total pressures. Ballas actually gave up more than that. It's equivalent with Darnell Wright, who's by the way, he dissed as well. Bears fans have every right to be beefy about, where, Darnell Wright is in his rankings as well. The Darnell Wright, a guy that that Chris and I interviewed at the Senior Bowl back in the day. Very, very good offensive tackle. We both really liked him and, considered him a a strong candidate for the Browns back or the the Lions back in that draft. He wound up going to the Bears instead and, has has become a very good player. No shade here on on Tarnell Wright. He's a good player. And now that has moved to the left side, he's got an argument as the best right tackle in football. But Clay has him as, like, nineteenth and twenty eighth, which is just stupid. Stupid. Again, with your offensive tackles, Do you care how often they win? No. Run blocking, yes. You do. Oh, by the way, Penay, the highest graded run blocker at 94 96.7 run blocker. Nobody else on this screen is above 90. Dominant dominant run blocker. Pass blocking is holding his own. Pass rush pass block efficiency, he's third. You want your guys to not lose in pass protection. Wins don't matter so much. It's a very weird statistics. It's a very weird thing to base pretty much all your negativity addressed at one player off of. It's like saying that Jared Goff's a terrible quarterback because he's not good at sneaking. Like, okay. Like, he throws the ball really well, very accurately to players all over the field. I can't name 10 offensive tackles that are better than Penay Sewell. I'll do one better than that. I can't name 10 football players active in the NFL today that are better than Penay Sewell. Can you? Tough to find them. It's a tough one. Yeah. I, that that that got the blood flowing a little bit from, looking at Twitter at morning breakfast the other day or x as they now call it. Whatever. These things, summertime rankings, all the stuff the NFL 100 that's coming out, I still don't know any players that have ever acknowledged that they've actually vote for it. But, k, it's going on for a long time. It's fun. Summer content list season, and I've I know this because I've had to participate in it for most of the last decade, and I'm very grateful that I don't have to this year. Now having said that, I will have power rankings up at Real GM, one to 32 fairly soon, have projected win win totals, and whether a scheme I think will exceed them or not exceed them. You know, will they be over? Will they be under? That's gonna be due by the end of the month, and I will do that as well. But in terms of ranking, an offensive line and ranking inherently is subjective. There's also with offensive line specifically, there's a lot of things that go into it. Would Penay Sewell be as you know, let me rephrase this. Would Garrett Ballas be as good in Detroit as he is in Denver? Probably, but I don't know.
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Speaker 4: There's a lot of things that go into your pass rush win rate. Do you have a tight end next to you or not? Who is the guard inside you? Is he good? Do you have a bad center as the lions did last year? And you have to shade your protections more inside because you're worried that your decrepit center is gonna get blasted, and you've gotta peel back and and get the guy that's coming up the middle at Jared Goff, who, by the way, can't move. That that that is the downside with Jared Goff is that if you get pressure on him right away quickly, he's gonna throw the ball away or turtle. That that that's who he is. That's that that's he he's still a great quarterback. But you've gotta think with Pena, okay. Like, I can't necessarily focus all my attention to the outside because I might have to help to the inside. That's true of a lot of these guys. Larry McDonald is listed on there. He's one of them. By the way, Larry Borom in the top 10. New Lions swing tackle Larry Borom in the top 10 in pass rush efficiency. That blew my mind seeing that, to be frank. Did not expect that. I probably need to watch more of Larry Borom in Miami if I can stomach watching that Miami offense long enough to get through that. Makes me feel better about the Lions picking up Larry Borom, honestly. Would Pene Sewell be good on any team anywhere? Is there anyone in America who watches even a modicum of football? Who thinks that, oh, no. He's a product of the lion's system. Come on, y'all. You say silly things for reaction. I I don't encourage that. Tends to bite you in the, you know, where it's okay to have questions about Penny Sewell and his pass he's a better run blocker than pass protector. I think even his most ardent supporters, I hell, I think Hank Fraley would tell you that. The offensive line coach of the lions. Danae might even tell you that, although he doesn't really talk, which is fine. It's good. It's just a very weird hill to keep dying on for Mike Clay that there are nine offensive linemen nine offensive tackles better than Beneath Sewell. Every other metric says otherwise, including the eye test. Very weird one. So I just spent thirteen minutes talking about another guy's rankings. I hate doing that crap. I really do. One of the reasons why I'm happy to be out of that shuffle tabloid style media crap. Trying not to do much of that here. You have to do a little bit of it. That's just and the nature of the beast is such that we have to a little bit. And not like, I I get that. My my former colleagues at the wires, I know are working on a bunch of different list projects right now.
Speaker 5: I don't miss that.
Speaker 4: Not one bit. Not one bit, especially since most people don't read them anyways. Spoiler alert. I hope that sheds some light on why it's ridiculous to claim that Penny Sewell is the tenth best offensive line. Again, the Lions' nineteenth overall, I'll quibble a little with that, but I'm not gonna hate on that. And based on the the way that he scores things with, you know, numeric grades and just adds them up, apparently, you can kinda see it there. I I cut the lines off a little bit, but, you know, Tate rallied shooting a five point five five point three. I can't read. Christian Mahogany at 4.4 based on how he played most of last season, especially after he got hurt. That's fair. It was below average. Five is average. Penay, 7.7. My god. Yeah. I don't get it. I don't. Sorry. I don't. Sorry, Mike Clay. I've never met you. Don't know anything about you. That's you're wrong, buddy. Sorry. Maybe dial back or I would actually encourage you to expand beyond your one data point from a subjectively graded system that has never really been fully explained to the public enough that we would buy it, and it also measures the wrong thing that you're looking for with pass protection. Again, I don't care if my guy wins in pass protection. I just don't want him to lose. The the numbers say that doesn't lose very often. One of the best. In fact, the third best. I'll trust that one. Give a win for there. They probably need the w. Anyhow, that's today's daily. Jeff Riston signing out. Be good to one another, everybody.
