Watch: Bernhard Raimann on video
Bernhard Raimann did not crack the top 10 in ESPN’s annual survey of league executives, coaches and scouts ranking the NFL’s best offensive tackles, but the Indianapolis Colts left tackle was named among the players also receiving votes — a group that included Brian O’Neill, Ronnie Stanley, Kolton Miller and Jake Matthews.
The survey, compiled by ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler, comes with a scout’s assessment that reads like a career summary: “He is a good example of sticking with a player. He started slowly but has continued to improve and was really good last year.” That trajectory is worth remembering. Raimann was a third-round pick in 2022, a converted tight end from Austria who was still learning the position when he was thrown into the lineup as a rookie. The early returns were rough. Four years later, opposing evaluators are volunteering his name in a best-at-the-position exercise.
Why it matters
From a roster-building standpoint, this is the quiet kind of win Indianapolis needs more of. Left tackle is one of the most expensive problems in football to fix from outside — the Cardinals’ Paris Johnson Jr. is publicly targeting $40 million a year on his next deal — and the Colts developed theirs in-house on a Day 2 pick. With Daniel Jones cleared for full participation as he returns from his torn Achilles, the state of the blind side stops being an abstraction. A quarterback coming off a major lower-body injury needs a left tackle he doesn’t have to think about, and the league’s own evaluators are saying Indianapolis has one.
The fix-it list in Indianapolis still runs through the interior of the defense and the linebacker room, not the offensive line. Protection was never the concern heading into camp; now there’s outside validation for that view.
The fantasy read here is indirect but real: offensive line stability is a floor-raiser for everyone behind it. Jonathan Taylor‘s efficiency depends on this front holding up, and a settled blind side improves Daniel Jones’s chances of being a usable streaming quarterback rather than a rehab question mark. Nobody drafts a left tackle, but Colts skill players get a small, quiet bump from news like this.
