Two offensive tackles from the national championship runner-up Washington Huskies team were selected over the first two rounds of the 2024 NFL Draft in April. They both entered the AFC North, joining opposite sides in one of the NFL’s best rivalries. Troy Fautanu, who played on the left side in college, joined the Steelers and Roger Rosengarten joined the Ravens.
There are many great edge defenders in the NFL, but even more so in the AFC North. T.J. Watt, Myles Garrett, Trey Hendrickson, Kyle Van Noy, Alex Highsmith, and others will present challenges to these rookie tackles both on the practice field and in the rivalry games throughout the season.
The Ravens have gone from having one of the most stable and competitive offensive lines in the league to facing a major issue on their 2024 roster. Kevin Zeitler and John Simpson left in free agency and the Ravens traded away OT Morgan Moses to the New York Jets. Replacing their combined 46 starts from the 2023 season will be a significant challenge in one offseason. It seems likely that Rosengarten will earn the starting role at some point in his rookie season, so they should find out pretty quickly if he has what it takes to hang with the level of competition in the AFC North.
Playing on the right side, he will be going head-to-head against T.J. Watt, something that Fautanu will not have to deal with outside of the practice field.
“Definitely during pre-draft, I was like, dang, T-minus 3 months. I was like, I’m going to be going against the best of the best within the Baltimore organization and then the rest of our division,” Rosengarten said in an interview on the Ravens’ YouTube channel when asked about going against T.J. Watt and others within the division. “There’s some freak athletes out there and I think those guys on the edge are definitely top of the pedestal when it comes to that. I just love the challenge though, want to bring it every single day.”
With Washington having Michael Penix Jr., a left-handed QB, Rosengarten was technically on the blindside playing on the right. And now both players will likely end up on the right side for the start of their NFL careers. They will be playing against a lot of the same edge rushers each season, so there will naturally be some competition between the former teammates to compare themselves moving forward.
He was asked if there will be some friendly competition between himself and his former teammate Troy Fautanu.
“Yeah, absolutely. It doesn’t have to be me and Troy. It could be anybody else in the NFL. I’m a fiend for competition, no doubt,” Rosengarten said. “I’ll root for Troy [Fautanu], but we gotta get those wins for sure versus them.”
The two bookends of the 2023 Joe Moore Award-winning Washington offensive line will certainly receive comparisons and be the topic of many debates moving forward playing the same position, in the same division, on opposite sides of one of the most heated rivalries in football.
