Sick of reading about "72 sacks allowed"

As someone who attended every Raiders home game last year (and all but 2 since they Returned to Oaktown), and watched every game on TV last season, I'm really sick and tired of the media harping on the woefulness of the Raiders' offensive line. There's a time when a statistic is a statistic (the baseball home run record for example... uh, perhaps not a good example. Heh.), and a time when statistics just don't show the entire truth. "72 sacks" is one of those misleading stats.

I know what you're thinking before you think it. Yes, our line was horrible last year (Gallery in particular was getting blown off the line in nearly every game), but not all those sacks can be directly attributed to poor line play. A fair number of those sacks were caused by Andrew Walter running out of bounds on the sideline without throwing the ball into the 4th row. (I wish the stat gurus at NFL.com would be accurate on tracking this.) Sadly, when a QB runs out of bounds short of the line of scrimmage, it's considered a "sack". Walter was so green last year that he probably didn't realize that once he was outside of the pocket, he could just chuck the ball out of bounds to avoid taking a loss. That's one of the critical mistakes a rookie QB can make (what Walter was, essentially, last year).

You wouldn't have seen Gannon, Hoss, or probably even the reviled Collins make that mistake because of their experience. It just goes to show that even our line play may have been bad, it really wasn't that bad. With the addition of Cooper Carlisle and another year under McQuistan and Boothe, we should cut the "72 sacks" figure in half or so.