Jawaan Taylor film review: Can the RT live up to his contract?
Looking at how Taylor closed out the season after a rough and very public start.
It’s hard to know where to start when writing about Jawaan Taylor.
The Chiefs right tackle just finished one of the strangest seasons for an offensive lineman that I can recall. If you’re reading this, you know what happened with Taylor early in the 2023 season. In Week 1, on national television, Cris Collinsworth talked somewhat extensively during the broadcast about Taylor’s “early” jump and alignment at the line of scrimmage. This is something that had been consistent with him (and multiple other tackles, most notably Lane Johnson) for years, but sometimes things just catch on and become a bigger story.
For several weeks thereafter, Taylor became a focal point for multiple penalties that were, to be perfectly blunt, not called consistently with how they were being called throughout the league. That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact, as I laid out in painstaking detail here after looking at how alignment was being officiated with other tackles vs Taylor.
The result of Taylor’s alignment and get-off being scrutinized and officiated differently was predictable. The veteran RT struggled throughout the first half of the season, racking up penalties and looking generally uncomfortable as he tried to adjust to being the focal point of a weird officiating “scandal” (I guess there are some downsides to playing for the Super Bowl champs in terms of attention). His pass protection was inconsistent from game to game and even snap to snap. No one would dispute that his play suffered a large dropoff from his impressive 2022 season, which I wrote about in detail here.
One thing to note right out of the gate is that Taylor is locked into the Chiefs roster (barring some sort of cataclysmic event) through the 2025 season due to the dead money on his contract. And make no mistake, Brett Veach brought him on to be a very good player, even a foundational one, given the money-per-year deal Taylor was given. So for all the talk of the Chiefs perhaps moving on, etc, he’s going to be the starter at RT at least the next two seasons (again, barring something crazy happening).
And so it makes sense to see how Taylor played down the stretch last year as he started to adjust to his “new” life of being a focal point of officiating (and as the heat died down a bit). And the only way to do that is to look beyond narratives and examine every snap. So that’s what I did, charting Taylor’s last seven games of the season (New England through the Super Bowl, excluding Week 18) to try and determine whether he was able to recapture his high-level pass protection form from the previous season.
In case you’ve forgotten or are new to this site, the way I review/chart OL play is for wins, losses, and neutral plays as a pass blocker (“PB”) and a run blocker (“RB”), while also looking at pressures/hits/sacks allowed. It’s a way to isolate how the lineman performed from the rest of the offense while avoiding some of the pitfalls of gauging offensive line play.
As a refresher, keep in mind that a 10% loss percentage is my line for what I’m comfortable with from a starter. There’s some variation game-by-game depending on quality of competition and amount of “help” a tackle gets (in the form of chips, moving pockets, rollouts, play action, slides, etc), but that 10% has served me well over the years. And losses are definitely the stat to watch the closest. The problem with a loss from an offensive lineman is that it can torpedo a play or, at the very least, make it much more difficult for the play to succeed. In other words, a win by a lineman doesn’t guarantee success, but a loss goes a long way towards guaranteeing failure.
All right, let’s talk Taylor’s film down the stretch, what I saw that was encouraging, what is a concern, and try to figure out what 2024 might hold for him. Let’s start with the numbers and go from there.