Ethnicsands
All-American
- Joined
- Nov 2, 2011
- Messages
- 22,724
Having a few OL in the nfl is not proof of your overall OL talent being better than another schools. Especially at OL, where it’s really about the entire unit. Especially when we know our OL has not been good. Overall talent and depth and experience matter. So maybe we play a true frosh with athletic upside, then send an (underdeveloped) erik flowers to the nfl. We also roll with no depth and some 4th-5th starters who just aren’t good enough. The question is whether our OL does its job well enough, not just whether some kids have bright futures.We have five OL in the NFL. All five started at least one game.
Clemson only has one OL who even played in the NFL last year. And that guy only played because the starter (Brandon Linder, the highest paid C of all-time) got hurt.
To be clear, I expect this to change. Clemson is going to start bringing in monsters on the OL. But they got to the peak of the mountain with worse OL talent than we've had for much of the past decade.
The idea that we need nfl talent all over to compete with alabama is also itself mistaken. Gino T won the Heisman and wasn’t an ‘nfl’ talent at QB. What we need is a 2-deep full of tough, physically developed kids with reasonable technique and experience playing together. A couple will be high ceiling kids, no doubt. It’s the ones who arent who are needed to separate us from the mediocre past.