We saw the same thing back in the day with Yanda playing next to Gino Gradkowski specifically. Yanda was still a good player, but we certainly were not getting the best out of him because they had his head on a swivel to try to cover for the empty hole next to him.I agree with that but again the line is a full ecosystem, every struggling player makes every other player worse, same goes for people playing well
You're kind of seeing the same thing with Linderbaum this year. He's still a good player, but he's certainly had more issues than I've ever seen. And the issue seems to be that he is taking on more 1v1 blocks than I've ever seen him take in order to try to keep those Gs as focused as they can be, because they can't do what Yanda was doing all of those years ago.