Unlike some of you, Sparano has no question new starting center Jake Grove will be an upgrade over Samson Satele. Although Grove has struggled to stay on the field because of injuries and really isn't that much different in height and weight than the departed Satele, the coach is confident Grove will be there for games and will stronger at the point of attack against AFC East nose tackes: "We've done our due diligence with the whole thing, obviously," Sparano said. "Jeff and Bill have done a tremendous job of getting into the background of all these guys we've brought here. I don't think that was really a concern of ours at the time. It certainly isn't.
"When you talk to people about Jake and his strength totals and the way he works in the weight room, you certainly get the picture. From our end, our offseason program is something that is important to us and Jake's there on campus right now. He's involved in lifting right now and the program hasn't even started. So we feel like that's something that helped an awful lot of our players last year."
Sparano, a former offensive line coach, cannot hide his like for the offensive line situation One of the things, first of all, is these guys have to get healthy," he said. "That's not completely done yet. Guys like Donal thomas and those kind of guys are a lot further along. So that's good to see. I just feel like in our division, your core, the inside three players, and having Jake Long and Vernon Carey now for a long time, that kind of solidifies an area a lot of these teams are still looking to find. They're all looking for tackles.
"But the core, having to play against [Kris] Jenkins, [Marcus] Stroud, [Vince] Wilfork, that group has to be physically strong enough, physically tough enough to do the things they need to do. I think that's the group, when you look at it, that needs to come along. Justin [Smiley] was playing better when he got injured. We make a move and have Jake Grove in there and that's an opportunity to upgrade that position. Then at the same time, you get Donald Thomas back and now you have [Shawn] Murphy, now you have [Andy] Alleman, and now you got guys that are providing some competition with Joe Berger. That will be a good problem for us."
