Many years ago Phil Steele in his pre-season publication included an article that some stat guys did and they did regression analysis on every stat they could think of to determine the single best predictor in the pre-season of a teams projected won / loss record and it was cumulative returning offensive line starts. It was not even close. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense.
Cowboy76 and myself must have purchased that magazine when it first came out because we were both discussing here at the same time.
The implications of this are meaningful. This year we had a few games in which our online played together for a few games and our run game got going. It was the first time in 2 years that happened. We had a brief respite from injuries.
We went from injured OL at the start of the season, to some brief health, and back to injured.
When healthy, it appears our current OL Coach can coach and prepare the team for a game.
At the end of the season last year we had a walk on Frosh starting against OU and we got kicked. Yesterday, our starting RFrosh OL got abused by their 350LB monster NG. One guy getting manhandled on the OL is a serious problem, especially when it is happening every play.
What needs to happen?
1. Injuries - I believe injuries is the result of playing young guys before they are physically ready to play and older guys like Sills that comes in and starts from day 1 and never gets a breather and never gets subbed out unless they are injured. You get injured when tired. His body accumulated all of these wear and tear injuries and by the end of the season he is beat down and not playing his best. Sills was one tough SOB to make it thru these final games but no way did he play at 100% efficiency. How is this fixed? See below.
2. No one should be stepping on to that field to start unless they have had 2 years of solid weight training with Glass or Glass says they are strong enough to play the position. Exception being if we somehow recruited a stud that is ready day one. Anyone not physically ready to play is an injury waiting to happen or will get abused. I also think perhaps we need to include some flexibility training for our OL, just to see if that might help with all the injuries as well.
3. In order to survive any type of injury along the OL, we need a solid 2 deep. We had that at one time under Wick. At OSU that has been very hard to do. Maybe we get good technicians to Coach our OL but guys that are not great recruiters. We need one of Dickey or McEndoo to be an ACE recruiter and evaluator and at least one a great coaching technician. We have to recruit better, and then we have to combine it with great development, coaching, and retention. We seem to have retention down good, we can develop guys but tend to force them to start earlier than they should. We need fewer recruiting misses. Can they be helped by the occasional 4 star recruit? How can we do a better job of evaluation?
4. The OL needs to be 5 guys working together in perfect harmony to make a fist. It is the one unit that does need accumulated offensive starts together to become a unit. When we had depth Wick played musical chairs with those guys all spring and and even in camp before the season. He did it to keep guys motivated but I believe he did it so we were prepared for injuries and also it accelerated the process of becoming a unit because each guy on the line had a appreciation and understanding of the responsibilities of each position. You could then leverage your knowledge in your position, to make the other guys job easier when certain things happen on specific stunts and looks, etc…. This is how I believe Wick accelerated the accumulated OL starts, he accelerated the development of the unit via musical chairs. We need to steal this back from him and use it again.
5. I have seen some discussion of recruiting OL to fit your system. I think in developing any OL you want guys that can both run and pass block. To me that is the ideal spot to be in. Different defenses are going to present different challenges so you need to do both well. And if you can do this, it makes it harder for defenses to load up on your weakness. Build an OL that can run and pass block. Build your play book around the QB’s abilities. This means you can build plays and a game plan around a dual threat guy or a pocket passer. It all starts at the OL.
This appears to be the next step the program needs to take. Having a great budget for assistants gets you to the starting line to being able to implement a plan at a position group for group development.
