State Of The Dallas Cowboys Roster: Offensive Line Continuity

In 2025, the presumptive starting five Cowboys offensive linemen (Guyton – T. Smith – Beebe – Booker – Steele) only played a grand total of 275 snaps out of a possible 1,186, the lowest level since at least 2021.

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Cowboys Starting Five, 2021-2025
Year	LT	LG	C	RG	RT	Combined Snaps	in % of Total
2021	Tyron Smith	C. McGovern	T. Biadasz	Z. Martin	T. Steele	457	37%
2022	Tyler Smith	C. McGovern	T. Biadasz	Z. Martin	T. Steele	528	45%
2023	Tyron Smith	Tyler Smith	T. Biadasz	Z. Martin	T. Steele	533	45%
2024	T. Guyton	Tyler Smith	C Beebe	Z. Martin	T. Steele	444	38%
2025	T. Guyton	Tyler Smith	C Beebe	T. Booker	T. Steele	275	23%

Last year, injuries to their starters forced the Cowboys into an uncommonly high amount of personnel changes along the O-line, leaving them with one of the least stable O-lines in the NFL

Continuity is one of the most critical ingredients to O-line success. The best offensive lines aren’t necessarily those with the best athletes or the highest-paid players, it’s the lines that play most effectively together. Familiarity with each other and playing together long enough gives linemen a better feel for each other, allowing them to anticipate what their fellow lineman is going to do when picking up stunts or passing a defensive lineman to the guy next to them. As continuity declines, scoring tends to decline and false start penalties tend to go up.

There are even numbers to back this up! The now defunct Football Outsiders developed a metric called OL Continuity that measures the amount of change along an O-line over the course of a season. If you had the same five linemen starting all 17 games, you got 51 points, and the more change you had along the line, the lower your score would be. FO explained the numbers as follows (based on a 16-game season):

Continuity Scores above 41: Teams with excellent continuity average 1.87 points per drive and commit about 21 false starts in a season.

Continuity Scores 27-40: Teams with average continuity score 1.70 points per drive and commit about 23 false starts.

Continuity Scores below 26: Once teams start shuffling linemen, those values drop to 1.49 points and 26 false starts.

It’s easy to confuse cause and effect in this situation — poor play leads to personnel changes as much as personnel changes lead to poor play — but the numbers suggest that teams should be wary of changing linemen just for change’s sake.

The way OL Continuity is calculated is fairly simple. The Continuity score starts with 51 and then subtracts:

• The number of players over five who started at least one game on the offensive line
• The number of times the team started at least one different lineman compared to the game before
• The difference between 17 and that team’s longest streak where the same line started consecutive games.

Aaron Schatz, who carries on the FO tradition at ftnfantasy.com, has not published the numbers for 2025 yet, so I went ahead and manually calculated the score for 2025. Applying FO’s metric to the 2025 Cowboys gives us the following:

• In addition to the five Week 1 starters (Guyton, T. Smith, Beebe, Booker, Steele), Brock Hoffman (7 starts), T.J. Bass (5 ), Nathan Thomas (4), and Hakeem Adeniji (1) all started games for the Cowboys, so that lowers the score by four points from the initial 51.
• The starting line changed nine times, which drops the score by another nine points.
• The longest stretch the Cowboys played with the same starting O-line was a three-game stretch from Week 9 through Week 12 (which included their bye week), and again from Weeks 9-12, which decreases the Continuity Score by 14 points.
• In total, the Cowboys’ Continuity Score for 2025 is 24.

That’s not a good place to be. Here’s how the Cowboys’ starting lineups along the O-line changed over the 2025 regular season:

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Cowboys O-Line Starters by Week, 2025
	1-2	3	4	5	6	7-8	9-12	13-15	16-17	18
LT	Guyton	Guyton	Guyton	Thomas	Guyton	Guyton	Guyton	Thomas	T. Smith	T. Smith
LG	T. Smith	T. Smith	T. Smith	Adeniji	T. Smith	T. Smith	T. Smith	T. Smith	Bass	Hoffman
C	Beebe	Hoffman	Hoffman	Hoffman	Hoffman	Hoffman	Beebe	Beebe	Beebe	Beebe
RG	Booker	Booker	Bass	Bass	Bass	Booker	Booker	Booker	Booker	Booker
RT	Steele	Steele	Steele	Steele	Steele	Steele	Steele	Steele	Steele	Steele

That’s a lot of change in one season, and not exactly conducive for building continuity. Last year, the Cowboys ranked T23rd with a score of 25, in 2024 they ranked 12th with a score of 30. This year’s score of 24 would have ranked T29th in 2025.

Heading into the season, nobody expected this iteration of the Cowboys O-line to be the second coming of the Great Wall of Dallas. But the Cowboys did enter the season expecting decent O-line play, given that the line featured three first-rounders – even if one of them was a rookie. And the hope was that with some time together to develop continuity and with strong coaching, the unit could perhaps turn into a good, maybe even a very good line. But injuries led to a lack of continuity that repeatedly threw the entire line out of whack.

Which leaves the Cowboys in a bit of a conundrum. If the line play was the result of poor individual play, then you’ll probably have to bring in players with better individual skills. But if the line play was the result of constant personnel changes, then new personnel may not be the answer.

We’ve barely started free agency, and the draft is still over a month away, so it’s not yet set in stone which direction the Cowboys will take.

Terence Steele’s new contract suggests the team is leaning more in the direction of continuity, at the starter spots particularly. At the same time, not tendering Brock Hoffman at all, and “only” tendering T.J. Bass, instead of signing both to contract extensions seems to speak to the Cowboys looking to bring in new players, at least at the backup spots.

Then again, head coach Brian Schottenheimer made it clear in Indianapolis at the NFL combine that he “absolutely” wanted Bass, along with Brock Hoffman, to be back in Dallas in 2026.

We’ll see how that all plays out.

The data above shows that the lack of continuity may have impacted the O-line’s performance in 2025 more than is widely acknowledged, and if nothing else, it provides some additional food for thought as we contemplate what the best strategy is for the Cowboys to win more games in 2025.