A Recruiter or a Teacher?
A Recruiter or a Teacher?
Brent Pry is in the market for a new offensive line coach. Coach Ideal is unavailable, so now it's all about prioritization.
Recruiting rankings are sourced from the repository at collegefootballdata.com that I accessed via the cfbfastr API connection.
Has the Virginia Tech fanbase ever cared as much about the offensive line coach as they have this week?
Remember when Jeff Grimes came in with the 2013 staff overhaul, stayed a year, then headed south? That guy is a great coach, but his departure elicited a collective shrug.
So why is it that with Joe Rudolph packing his bags for South Bend there is a sense that the sky is falling?
Rudolph is a good coach, but the line was pretty bad last year. Coaching at Notre Dame is a unique and historic opportunity that, if you are really good and really lucky, comes around once in a career. Throw in Rudolph’s ties to the Midwest and, frankly, this is a job he has to take. The fact that he apparently hesitated is a testament to Virginia Tech and Brent Pry.
So congratulations to Rudolph, and Brad Glen as well. It is a positive sign that both coaches left for more attractive positions, despite last year’s struggles. It speaks well of Pry’s ability to both identify and sign quality assistant coaches. Obviously, Penn St.’s overtures to Fontel Mines provide further proof.
All that said, the talk this week got me thinking about offensive line play, in particular the differences between high performing and low performing linemen. Coaching, development, and system fit are all important components, but how much credit should we give recruiting? With much of the coaching carousel settled, it seems unlikely that the Hokies will get a coach who is both an elite recruiter and and elite on-field developer of talent, but the money is certainly there to get one or the other. So what should be the priority?
Not a crapshoot, but not far from it
There was some truly horrendous offensive line play in the ACC last year, so if anything, this would be the year to tease out a difference between the recruiting rankings of the top performers in comparison to the bottom.
For this analysis, I set the cut-off at 600 snaps (50 per game in a 12 game season) because I wanted to focus solely on starters. These are the guys who determine wins and losses.
I used PFF grades to form two groups of 12 - the top and bottom players with at least 600 snaps by offensive grade. Here are the counts by team for the two groups, first the top group:
Outside of Florida St., this list is representative of the final 2022 ACC standings. Who’d have guessed, good teams feature good offensive line play? Conversely, the same in reverse can be said about bad teams:
Ok, no surprises so far. Offensive line play is a major key to winning football games, check!
But where I get curious is around what is actually driving good offensive line play. Is this primarily a recruiting issue, in which case the Hokies should prioritize that aspect of a coach’s skillset? Or is it more a coaching/scheme fit thing?
At first blush, the numbers from our Top and Bottom 12 groups would appear to suggest prioritizing fit and on-field coaching ability over recruiting:
The first things that should stick out in the above table are the average/median offensive grades. The delta in both cases is around 20, which in the PFF world is quite large. Virginia Tech’s lone representative is Parker Clements (Bottom 12), who we found out last week was recovering from a major knee injury during the 2022 season and only rounded into shape toward the end of the year. Why Rudolph would play him almost every down at right tackle when he had hardly lifted all offseason and the Hokies were trying to establish a power rushing game is a bit perplexing.
Anyway, the difference between the players on the two lists is nearly the difference between 2021 Parker Clements (74.2) and the 2022 version 50.1. That is to say, it’s night and day. And I really expected a similar difference in recruiting ratings, but no dice.
The average player in the Top 12 group was a high three-star recruit, while the average player in the Bottom 12 group was a run-of-the-mill three-star recruit. The Top 12 group even featured a player with no rating coming out of a high school and one below 0.8.
So, there really is not that much difference, at least in the ACC, between the best and the worst (by PFF grade) performing offensive linemen. The top guys start out, on average, a little bit ahead (higher recruiting ratings suggest earlier development). That would support the notion that good enough recruiting plus great coaching and physical development would be enough to produce a line worthy of an ACC title contending team.
What about the big dogs?
At the dawn of the millennium, the Hokies were a quarter away from winning a National Championship. It has been a slow slide into mediocrity, but while I am not convinced they will ever get that close to winning a National Championship again, I’m not convinced that they cannot. So let’s extend this exercise to look at the back-to-back defending national champion Georgia Bulldogs.
All five Georgia starters played at least 600 snaps last year. Gaudy as their recruiting rankings may be, their PFF grades are somewhat underwhelming. Sure, every one of those players registered a year that falls somewhere in the good to very good range, but none were truly outstanding. In 2020, Christian Darrisaw and Luke Tenuta both had an offensive grade higher than every one of these national champion Bulldogs.
We’re dealing with fairly small samples here, but my preliminary conclusion is that recruiting ranking is more indicative of a player’s floor than it is his ceiling. One can pretty much guarantee that a five-star offensive lineman will pan out to be at least a good player. Stack enough of those guys on your team, and when guys go down with an injury, the team won’t miss a beat.
The ceiling is much trickier to gauge. When I think about Darrisaw, I think there is something there beyond what we can currently measure. The guy who manages to quantify, efficiently measure at scale, and analyze each player’s fire-in-the-belly is going to make some serious money.
Where does all this leave Virginia Tech?
If we consider the current linemen in the program who were recruited by Virginia Tech as offensive linemen (so this would exclude guys like Jack Hollifield, who was recruited as a linebacker and later switched to center), we see a group that looks more like the Top 12 than the Bottom 12:
Better still, 10 out 13 players graduated high school in 2022 or will do so in 2023 so, portal willing, the future looks bright. Finally, the two lowest rated players have been firmly entrenched as starters on the right side of the line since 2021 (Kaden Moore at RG and Parker Clements at RT), meaning that 10 of the 11 highest rated players are in their first or second year.
There is enough talent in the offensive line room to field a unit that grades out in the Top 5 of the ACC in 2023. Reaching that level depends firmly on coaching and development. The ten players from the ‘22 and ‘23 classes will play a big role in determining the success or failure of Brent Pry’s tenure as head coach. Therefore, if I were him, I would go in search of the best on-field coach from the Joe Morehead coaching tree that $750k can buy. If he is someone from FCS that no one has heard of before, so be it. As long as he can simplify his teachings (I don’t want to see heads tying up feet this fall!), elicit consistent effort, and get his guys to execute the plays Tyler Bowen calls, I think he’ll do the trick.