Noteboom & Allen

Brian Allen ready to compete for starting center

https://www.therams.com/news/brian-allen-ready-to-compete-for-starting-center

When first-round picks enter the league, they’re often expected to start right away.

Analysts break down their film and talk about the fit with their new team on draft night, as they’re often thought of as filling an immediate need.

But for a fourth-round pick? That’s really not the case — especially because those players often sit.

Like Rams center Brian Allen, who was the 111th pick of the 2018 NFL Draft just over a year ago.

“Mel Kiper wasn’t talking about me when it came to draft time,” Allen joked in a recent interview with therams.com for Season 2 of Behind the Grind. “And I wasn’t some huge talent who ran fast or jumped high.”

Instead, Allen says, he was “just a football player.” And that was enough for Los Angeles’ brass — including run game coordinator/offensive line coach Aaron Kromer — to bring in the 6-foot-2, 303-pound lineman out of Michigan State.

“If you can play, you can play — and it’s the way it is,” Allen said of Kromer’s philosophy. “But not all offensive line coaches look at offensive linemen like that. So having a guy who believes in me and believes that I can play at this level is big.”

Allen, of course, didn’t play much during last year’s run to Super Bowl LIII. As a rookie, he saw mainly mop-up duty for a few games — both victories over Arizona and the Week 17 win over San Francisco. But he was also in for three plays in spot duty for starting center John Sullivan during the Week 14 matchup in Chicago.

But even in limited playing time, Allen says he was able to learn a lot in his rookie year — mainly through the player in front of him.

“Being behind [Sullivan] was honestly one of the best things that I think has happened to me,” Allen said. “Coming from college, you get in a college offense, and being in the same system for four years, eventually I knew everything in that. And you get to a new system and you know the basics, and a guy like him starts talking and starts using words I don’t know and describing defenses in ways I’ve never even thought about. And being able to see the way he thinks and the way that he went about the calls and stuff like that — I don’t think there’s a center in the NFL who’s smarter than him as far as making the right ‘Mike’ point at the center position. That’s obviously huge.

“And the stuff he does is pretty unbelievable if you can really get in and grasp the stuff that he sees. So just being behind him for the whole year was honestly — at the end of my career, I’ll be most thankful for that because he took me from here to here,” Allen continued, displaying different levels with his hand. “And I still have a long way to go, but without having that I don’t — again, being behind another center on another team, I don’t if I’d be as good as I am now.”

Kromer noticed the kind of detail Allen put into his study last year — despite the fact that he wasn’t playing. And that’s part of the reason why Kromer and the team are confident in Allen’s ability to become a starter.

“Brian Allen really paid attention and was working closely with John Sullivan, who — what a great vet,” Kromer told therams.com. “But Brian shows that he has that innate intelligence and that vision that he can see the defense. But his number one overall trait is going to be his physical nature. He’s a powerful, quick offensive lineman who has the vision to see the defense. So we’re looking forward to him.”

And Allen is looking forward to his opportunity — and that’s as far as he’ll classify it. While general manager Les Snead and head coach Sean McVay have said that Allen slots in as Los Angeles’ starting center after the team declined the option on Sullivan’s contract in March, Allen realizes there’s a lot of time between now and Week 1.

Because of that, Allen wants to make sure he’s doing everything he can to truly earn the role between now and September.

“I mean, the season’s a long way away. I don’t want to say that it’s mine by any means. There’s the draft coming up, free agency is still going on,” Allen said. “But at the same point, I’m not here to be a backup. That’s obviously the goal. I didn’t want to just get here and be on the team. I want to play, and I want to play at a high level.”

“So I’m excited for the opportunity that’s in front of me and I’m really just excited to be able to show what I learned this whole last year. I didn’t play a lot as you guys know, but I got a whole lot better from the last preseason game to the end of the year. So a lot of time, a lot of knowledge that I’ve learned a lot of everything. And back to our O-line room, I wouldn’t be here without them. And I’m kind of mind-blown myself at the steps and progressions I’ve made, just understanding football, being in that room every day with those guys.”

Kromer: “Joe showed that ability that we feel like he can go in at left guard and hold his own”

https://www.therams.com/news/kromer-on-joseph-noteboom

When Los Angeles selected offensive lineman Joseph Noteboom at No. 89 in the third round of the 2018 NFL Draft, the thought was that eventually Noteboom would take over at left tackle.

At this point, that’s still likely to be the case. But after a year of backing up an offensive line that kept its same starting group from Week 1 to Super Bowl LIII, Noteboom is penciled in to ascend into a first-team role — at left guard.

As run game coordinator/offensive line coach Aaron Kromer said in an interview with therams.com for Season 2 of Behind the Grind, Noteboom showed enough skill and versatility early on that L.A. was confident enough to have him be the backup for every position but center as a rookie.

“Noteboom played left tackle at TCU, was drafted as a tackle prospect, but what we prefer to do in our offense at this organization is move our offensive linemen around if they’re not a starter because you dress seven guys on gameday. So you need somebody who can backup both tackles,” Kromer said. “We felt last year, the best situation was no matter what position other than center, if we needed him, would be Joe. And so Joe got the opportunity to practice at four different spots the entire year. So he was ready to play left tackle, right tackle, right guard, left guard.”

Noteboom did not have many opportunities to get in games, but when he did he excelled. He was in for a few snaps here and there for most of the season, but received the most playing time against the 49ers in Week 17 when left tackle Andrew Whitworth knocked knees with another player and ended up missing about two thirds of the game.

But on the drive where Noteboom entered in the second quarter, the Rams executed a wide receiver screen to Brandin Cooks on the left side for an 18-yard touchdown. Noteboom got off the line perfectly to execute his block on the cornerback to help free up Cooks for what was his second TD of the game.

That series — and, really, Noteboom’s performance in that game as a whole — was emblematic of the way he seemed to always know what to do, despite being a particularly quiet presence in the OL room.

“There’s a lot of conversation during the meetings in our meeting room amongst the players — player to player, coach to player, and so on. So making sure we all agree that this is the way it’s going to happen. And with Joe not playing, he wasn’t in that five-man conversation,” Kromer said. “But at the same time, if Joe Noteboom called me right now, didn’t tell me who it was, I might not recognize his voice. That’s how little he talks. But any time that anyone asked him a question in those meetings, he knew the answer. He knew how to do it, what to do. And as a rookie to have that much attention to detail, that says a lot about Joe.”

Noteboom told therams.com that he saw only advantages to sitting behind high-level veterans like Whitworth and left guard Rodger Saffold in his rookie season because he was able to learn so much.

“That’s been one of the best things about being here so far, is just kind of having those veterans to just guide me along the way, having the redshirt year to watch those guys and see how they do things on and off the field,” Noteboom said. “Getting to sit behind those guys, getting to watch for an extra year, letting me sit back and kind of observe how they do things, I kind of modeled my game after that and got a bunch of practice reps for Whitworth and Saffold.”

So as the Rams get ready to begin their offseason program, Kromer feels Noteboom is prepared to take the next step to become a starter on Los Angeles’ offensive line — largely because of the experience the young OL gained in 2018 to be prepared to play anywhere.

“That’s what these guys want coming out of college — just put me on the field. I don’t care what position, I’ll go play,” Kromer said. “And Joe showed that ability that we feel like he can go in at left guard and hold his own.”