Nothing like hearing Zeier (tool) talk about GT's big offensive line wearing down the Dwags' defense late in the game in 14. That O line did have some heft to it - Shaq, Errin Joe, Chamberlain, Freddie Burden, et al ... ain't none of them 6-1, 260.
Mid year , afrer sputtring we got erin joe and shamire added to the mix. We changed the drive blocking technique . Hit them high and worked into mid body and legs. We had a massive ol and until next year (ND) no one knew how to stop it.
The next season (2015) we lost 3 OL from the year before: Mason graduated, Burden multi-game injury, and Griffin career ended by injury. Plus we lost 5 of the top 6 Abacks: Perkins, Hill, Bostic, and Zenon all graduated and Andrews was dismissed. All not to mention Laskey and Days both graduated. 2015 was a shadow of 2014, but still beat FSU and lost 4-5 others by one score.
I was about to say. I’m of the strong belief that a good OL = a winning team, no matter your system. 2014 had a strong OL and turned into a top ten team, 2015 was missing that (mostly due to injury, ie. through no fault of our guys)
Losing Andrews was the key.he was going to be the killer back--size and skill.I never really heard the story on his leaving.
I thought he was dismissed for hanging out with Mary Jane
As you may have guessed by now, I'm very, very reluctant to get on Paul's case about anything. His decision to put Laskey out there to return punts was a frosh is an exception. The 2015 team with him on the field as a red-shirt senior would have won at least two, maybe 3 more games. He would have given JT that push up the middle the O needed to work effectively. But, as Paul sometimes said, hindsight is 20/20. I'm sure he regretted that decision himself.
Gt put bryan in at end of freshman year when team was terrible. He played well then and in following years he did good job at every position asked
Knew one or two Southern OL who weren't thrilled with Sewak as a position coach, either, when he was there under PJ.
I always understood the criticisms of Sewak and I also understood why Paul kept him on. It's important, I think, to remember that Sewak was former head coach at Southern and was very successful (35 - 14 and 2 championships in four years) at the job. And all this running the spread option. You don't fire that kind of experience when his OL is producing results, no matter how the OLs think about their time on the field,
The sad news to all of this is GT should have supported PJ more in his last 5 years. The difficulty of NIL and diverging TV revenue has made the ability to recover and be a more force in college football is so much more difficult than it would have been 8 to 10 years ago.
As I have sometimes said before there ought to be degrees of "like" here. If there were I'd like this 1000%!
Interesting perspective. I more so recall a former player or two (from non Paul regimes) being the only ones on this board still defending Collins long, long after it was even obvious to the folks w/o football knowledge that the Collins era was a disaster. They kept pushing their “football knowledge” saying we just can’t see the improvements. Gate keepers are going to gate keep.
I agree with this other than the “everyone”.
You mean the same guy that didn't know the R in RPO alerted you to the fact the OL were supposed to be run blocking instead of just drop back pass blocking?