Forrest Lamp, Garrett Bolles emerge as big winners from O-line combine drills
INDIANAPOLIS — True, this does not have the look of an all-time great offensive line draft class. There still are four, and maybe five, O-linemen with designs on the first round.
Utah’s Garrett Bolles and Western Kentucky’s Forrest Lamp definitely helped their respective causes Friday during on-field workouts at Lucas Oil Stadium. Bolles, already pegged as one of the most athletic linemen in this class, ran a 4.96 40-yard dash with a 1.71 10-yard split. Only TCU’s Aviante Collins—en route to an impressive 4.78 40—topped Bolles’s 10-yard mark, at 1.69. (Collins, by the way, also recorded 34 bench-press reps at 225 pounds, one behind Isaac Asiata’s top mark among the offensive linemen.)
“I know I have what it takes to be a franchise tackle in this league,” Bolles said earlier this week.
Lamp was right on the five-second mark with his two 40 efforts (4.99 and 5.0 flat, unofficially), with sub-1.8 splits in the 10-yard window. He matched Collins’s 34 bench reps.
Bolles (6' 4", 295 pounds with 34" arms) has the physical measurements to play on the edge at the next level. Lamp (6' 4", 309 with 32 1/4" arms) may not, even though his arm length rose an inch from where it was at the Senior Bowl—multiple players seemed to have been shortchanged by the arm measurements in Mobile.
But in the cases of both Bolles and Lamp, athleticism is the calling card, as the timed and positional drills showed Friday. The question of whether these prospects would go Round 1 is starting to give way to figuring out just how high they can climb.
Bolles might not be able to leapfrog Cam Robinson atop the tackle group, but he should be in the mix right behind him, along with Wisconsin’s Ryan Ramczyk (who isn’t running drills in Indy, following hip surgery). Bolles comes with a unique background, though, which includes being kicked out of his own home by his father, being dismissed from five different high schools and an arrest. He’ll also be 25 by rookie training camp. NFL teams will have to decide how that all factors in with his obvious upside as a blocker.
Lamp’s anticipated bump inside to guard after playing tackle in college puts him into competition with the likes of Ohio State’s Pat Elflein (who’s probably an NFL center), Indiana’s Dan Feeney, Pittsburgh’s Dorian Johnson and Temple’s Dion Dawkins to be the first interior lineman off the board. A team still could try Lamp at tackle, too, shortish arms be damned.
There’s plenty more to unpack about this O-line class before the draft arrives, but Bolles and Lamp are solidly in the first-round mix and Friday’s workouts only reaffirmed as much.
