About a half hour after Eagles center Jason Kelce was named to his third consecutive All-Pro team, he called Brandon Brooks “the best offensive lineman in the NFL.”
But “the best offensive lineman in the NFL” didn’t join him on the All-Pro team.
No other way to put this: Brooks is an egregious snub.
There’s a reason the Eagles made the 30-year-old Brooks the highest-paid offensive guard in the league earlier this season. There’s a reason the folks at ProFootballFocus rave about him. There’s a reason Brooks gave up just one sack this season.
The Associated Press All-Pro team is voted on by a panel of 50 media members around the country. They got this one wrong.
Brooks didn’t even make the second team at right guard.
Cowboys right guard Zack Martin was on the first team with 24 votes. Baltimore’s Marshal Yanda was a second-teamer with 16 votes. Brooks took just nine votes to come in third.
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No disrespect to Martin and Yanda, but Brooks deserved to make the team. When someone uses the word snub, which is often overused, I always say, “Well, who would you take off the list?”
If I ask myself that question about this vote, it’s an easy answer: I’d take both of them off the list to put Brooks on it. Brooks had a dominating 2019 season.
For all its flaws, ProFootballFocus is a valuable tool to evaluate offensive linemen. It provides numerical data for a position that otherwise wouldn’t have any. And PFF loves Brooks.
This season, Brooks was PFF’s top guard with a career-high 92.9 rating. He gave up just 19 total pressures and just one sack. And he was tremendous in the run game and on screens.
While Lane Johnson has a case to be called a snub this year too, Johnson played in just 12 of 16 games. He missed a quarter of the season. Brooks didn’t.
Brooks missed time in three games this season. In the opener after coming back from an Achilles tear, he was on a pitch count. In the first game against Seattle, he played just 12 snaps before he was forced out of the game with a recurrence of his anxiety symptoms. And in the regular-season finale, he left after 39 snaps when he suffered a season-ending shoulder injury.
Despite all that, Brooks still played 1,064 snaps out of 1,183 (90 percent) this season. He was the Eagles’ best and most consistent offensive lineman all season.
And Brooks played just 58 fewer snaps than Martin and played 77 more than Yanda.
It’s worth noting that both Martin and Yanda had previously been named first-team All-Pros before. It can take time to buck familiarity in voting, especially for positions like offensive guard. But Brooks should have done enough.
This season, he came back from an Achilles tear in less than eight months and immediately played at an even higher level than when he left. Last month, he was named to his third consecutive Pro Bowl team.
Brooks is facing another surgery and rehab this offseason, but after what he did last offseason, there’s no doubt he’ll be able to come back better than ever.
Maybe that’ll finally be enough to get him on the All-Pro team.
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