“The SEC is a Line of Scrimmage League”
Football Outsiders has been ranking FBS offensive and defensive lines since 2014. They measure performance on standard downs and passing downs. They give offensive lines credit I think for up to the first 3 yards and then 50% of the yards up to 8. Everything over 8 yards goes to the running back. Standard downs and passing downs I think are defined by where you are relative to schedule. For example if you take a sack or otherwise don’t gain your scheduled yards on first down then second down becomes a passing down because you’re behind schedule. Negative yardage plays are assessed against the offensive line at 125% of the yardage lost. They delete garbage time plays from the analysis. That’s a basic description of how they do it, to my understanding.
The following table looks at the rankings for offensive lines of interest. Elarbee was the Arkansas State OLine coach in 2014 and 2015, then joined Heupel at MO in 2016 & 2017, then followed him to UCF in 2018-20, and is now here with him. It is often said that an OC can help the OL so I’m also showing the OL’s for Heupel’s career, where data is available. I would note that when you have to replace a substantial portion of your OL from one year to the next I think it has mostly been expected that the OL will regress to some degree. Experience in college football is most valuable on the LOS, particularly so in the SEC. jmo.
I’ve also added two columns on the right to show the rankings of the defensive lines by Football Outsiders, for Tennessee and Auburn. Garner has been the DLine coach at Auburn since before Football Outsiders started tracking line performance. Before that Garner was at Georgia for a number of years. I’m not sure we could have hired a better DLine coach. I hope I don’t have to eat those words. jmo.
While we lost some guys on the OL even with his idiocy and constant shuffling I think Pruitt accidentally left us with a lot of guys that have experience. We’re a long ways from starting over. I think the same is true for the DLine and given the expected change in scheme I wasn’t surprised to see Mincey hit the transfer portal. I don’t think he’s fast enough to be a 4-2 DE and not big enough to be a DT. He was recruited for a 3-4 base and I presume he’d have precious few snaps if he stayed with us. jmo.
I don’t think you can actually compare offensive lines with a Pro-style QB to offensive lines with a Dual-threat QBs and expect it to be a fair comparison but Football Outsiders makes no distinction. For example, Josh Dobbs may have been able to play behind a middle school offensive line even in the SEC and make them look good. jmo
I think you can see in the table that Elarbee had to start from scratch at ASU and MO but inherited some experience at UCF. I think the table indicates that he has had a lot of success developing and improving offensive line performance. In 2018 if you recall we didn’t have enough offensive linemen here for spring practice. While many fans might argue otherwise the data clearly indicates we have been improving.
Offensive and defensive lines aren't like the skill positions. They seldom get the glory and almost always take the blame for the poor play of some of the skill position guys. I think the table accurately reflects where we were and the improvement we’ve been able to make on the LOS on both sides of the ball. I expect given who Heupel has chosen to coach those position groups, and with our returning experience, improvement should continue into this coming year. jmo.
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