I count 17 OL drafted since ‘00. Maybe I missed one.
7 were between ‘00–‘05. (Mercier, McKinnie, Bibla, Gonzalez, Carey, C. Joseph C. Myers.) Butch recruits. Nuff said.
So we are talking about ten kids over 14 years. Not bad but not evidence of great lines each year, either. But let’s look more closely:
- Coker had 2 OL kids he recruited get drafted (Winston, Butler, both ‘06). (Jason Fox (’10) was recruited under Coker by Mario but signed by Shannon iirc.)
- Shannon/Stoutland had 6 (Franklin, BW, Linder, Seantrel, Feliciano, and Fox).
- Golden brought in Flowers and Isidora. The rest of his OL evals were bad. His highest rated kids were St. Louis, Darling and McDermott, and none were drafted. However, and maybe it’s relevant to the Clemson analogy, they were all contributors. We’d do okay recruiting more of them, the NFL aside. (No credit to Golden, who also brought in Bar Milo, Loftus, Jahair Jones et al.)
Richt got us Donaldson and Scaife, but also a bunch of bad evals from the looks of it, compounded by Searels and Richt’s offense.
Bottom line: if you exclude Stoutland’s kids, you’re talking about 4 kids over 10 years (deducting 4 Stoutland years and 6 Stoutland kids). And only 2 recruited since Shannon left town. If you think the ‘17 kids since ‘00’ means a lot, you may want to dig deeper.