Even goddamn Madden will teach you some basic stuff, and I mean literally teach you it to you in practice tutorials, like how and what specific route combos can beat a given zone coverage scheme and how to read the blocking as it develops in an inside zone. As for seeing a QB going through his reads or progressions, it's not that hard to guess as to what was probably the design based on what routes the receivers the running and what the defense was doing, nevermind just the simple act of watching where the QB is looking. (Like, if a guy is looking at the same receiver the entire time and then gets his pass picked off by a safety who came rushing in... generally speaking you can assume
exactly what happened there.) You won't always be right, but you don't have to be.
It's tremendously disappointing to think that the oline is a house of cards, and if Trent Brown is out (or has a bad day) the whole thing collapses, but that's the way it looks, certainly.
Of course, the oline is important.
As I said, it's disappointing that you can lose one piece and the whole line falls apart. One would hope that it might degrade a bit rather than utterly collapse.
The following isn't all that true in general because it's a vast oversimplication, but on a specific given play an offensive line tends to be only as strong as its weakest link. It's possible to scheme around to a degree, but if there was a team rolling out an offensive line of Joe Thomas, John Hannah, prime Rodney Hudson, Larry Allen, and then me, Big McCorkle, as their right tackle, their QB would be in for a very bad day. (And I played tackle for the three months I played peewee tackle football because I was basically too tall to be allowed to carry the ball, which was some
bullshit that I'm still a bit salty about.) The problem is just that Herron has been
that bad. Even with occasionally getting beat by schemed pressures, It's not a matter of the offensive line as a whole, it wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem if Mason got hurt and Karras had to come in, it's a matter of the tackle depth specifically being very bad. It wasn't as much of an issue last year because they were happy to slide Onwenu over to tackle, Herron wasn't as bad as he's been so far this year, and because Eluemenor...
Wait, what the actual fuck, Eleumenor went to the Raiders for all of one million dollars? He was perfectly serviceable as a right tackle. Was it really more important to roster Jakob Johnson? Jesus.