Falcons O-line is OK

Ryan Schraeder; 2; 1; 6

Chris Chester; 4; 0; 9

Mike Person; 0; 2; 5

Andy Levitre; 1; 2; 14

Jake Matthews; 1; 2; 12

Source: Pro Football Focus

Glendive, Mont., has 6,000 citizens and one fossil museum. That is the hometown of Falcons center Mike Person, yet another find unearthed from the Montana badlands.

The slightly eccentric back story is the norm among those who have done such surprising work in keeping Matt Ryan perpendicular and constructing Devonta Freeman an HOV lane through all kinds of defensive traffic.

When you make your way back to the recess of the locker room where the offensive linemen roam, the music is almost old enough to require carbon dating — as is the working-class attitude. (Or, as guard Chris Chester summarizes the group: “Good guys who are selfless and ready to be part of something great”).

This day, it is Creedence Clearwater Revival giving way to Cream playing low from a guard’s locker.

And this day it is Person trying to explain how a small group of endomorphs, seemingly thrown together in a desperate casserole just before the season began, has quickly congealed into something so useful.

“It’s just everybody being themselves,” he said. “This group doesn’t have any outcasts, any loners. It’s just one of those things — we came together.”

Person’s position coach, Chris Morgan, also chooses to use a personality profile rather than X’s and O’s on a dry erase board to try to explain the unforeseen play of his line. “It’s these guys, the closeness of these guys,” he said. “It’s really important to these guys. They strain every day at practice and that is a credit to them.”

This coach talks so much about straining, you can suffer a hernia by just listening to him: “Each guy will strain in practice, strain in games. They haven’t been together very long. It’s cool to see them take steps every week.”

And here we thought the O-line was going to be the ruination of a season, rather than the most unlikely contributor to an unlikely 6-1 season.

How could anyone with two eyes and a functioning memory expect big things of a unit that has been a sore point for seasons and whose makeup was radically altered at the 11th hour this year? Just look at them.

The right tackle was a 5-foot-7 Kansas high school senior who never visited the business side of his school’s football field. Even after the bamboo-like growth spurt — nine inches in a year, with more to come later — Ryan Schraeder was nobody’s natural.

A coach at his community college spotted him playing pickup basketball and talked Schraeder into trying football. That very nearly was an overnight transaction. “The first camp at junior college, I said this is hard,” he remembered. “I almost quit. Why was I doing this? I just want to go to school. My dad talked me through it.”

Schraeder wound up at Valdosta State and summarily wound up undrafted. The Falcons signed him as a free agent in 2013, where he did his internship on the practice squad.

His neighbor at right guard is the elder presence in the Falcons’ locker room, if only for the gray that has prematurely salted his hair and beard. That began back in his late teens, Chester said, and 10 seasons playing a human barricade in the NFL hasn’t slowed the process.

“I don’t fight (the gray); I just accept it,” Chester said, blowing up his chance at a Just For Men endorsement deal. “My wife’s happy with it, so I don’t really care.”

It was the Redskins who thought Chester obsolete and the Falcons who signed him in May, less than a week after his release.

And who in the world goes from an unpromising prospect in Glendive, Mont. — “My junior year in high school I couldn’t chew gum and walk at the same time, I was so uncoordinated,” Person said — to snapping the ball to Ryan?

And who bounces around between four other NFL teams, never getting a chance to start, hardly getting to play, before landing in the center of the fifth most productive offense in the league?

At 27, Person is suddenly bigger in Glendive than Buzzard Day (which fell on June 13 this year). And he’s just about got the whole simultaneous walking and chewing thing licked: “I can do that now — I think. Although I’m sure some guys think I’m still pretty uncoordinated,” he said.

There is a thread running through the entire offensive line that may help explain its effectiveness today: The need of these players in one way or another prove themselves.

Listen to Schraeder talk about how he went from community-college rookie to the NFL and you can hear the willingness he brings to his thankless craft. “I felt like I was coachable. If you tell me something, I’ll listen; I’ll try to do it. I may not get it right the first time, but I at least try.

“That’s a lot of it. You got to be willing to do it, and some people aren’t.”

That thread even extends to the high-money district of the offensive line — the left side where Jake Matthews and Andy Levitre live.

Last year’s first-round draft pick, Matthews, playing injured, was a source of Ryan’s pain in 2014, giving up 51 “pressures,” fourth most in the league. Through seven games this season, he is feeling much better and has yielded one sack, one hit and 12 pressures, according to Pro Football Focus.

Left guard Andy Levitre signed a $47 million contract with Tennessee in 2013 and he, too, played down to knee and hip injuries. The Titans gave him away to the Falcons just 10 days before the regular-season opener, trading him for a sixth-round pick and a future conditional pick.

“A great opportunity for a fresh start, a chance to go out and play football,” Levitre says, like a man pardoned.

There are real, tangible reasons behind the line’s productivity, not the least of which spring from Freeman’s legs and vision as well as Ryan’s release.

Then there is the more ambiguous explanation centering on a group of players who refused to believe they were going to be nearly as great a disaster as the outside world assumed. Add to that a new coach whose upbeat style fed that refusal.

“Positivity is an underlying theme to everything we do,” Chester said.

“The enthusiasm that we have in this building is a big factor,” Person said. “I’ve been places where it has been pretty dreary. But the enthusiasm surrounding everything here from the top down, it’s tremendous.”

No, this is not a royal line, nor a fine line. Nothing fancy about it. More an assembly line, really, a humble, somewhat quirky collection surprisingly in sync and thus far productive beyond all early quotas.