By the numbers, 17 should’ve been one of PJ’s best years. Better on both sides of the ball than in 16, and had a better offense with basically the same defense as in 08.
If Taquon pitches that ball against Tennessee that year could’ve looked a lot different. Weird how it played out, should’ve beat Miami too. And had UCF come to Atlanta to play, their run of being the best G5 school may have never happened.
Yeah, I noted the weirdness of 2017-2018 in a post a few weeks ago. The fact that our offense was top 25 in 2017 and top 20 in 2018 seems nutso on the face of it —— TM was the least capable passing QB in the CPJ era other than Oliver. We had Jeune in 2017, which helped, but the overall lack of a passing game should have doomed us.
However, TM was a fantastic, tough runner and we had a real bumper crop of B-Backs during this stretch: Mason, Howard, and Benson in 2017. I especially liked Benson, who at 10.6 in the 100 meters was the first speed burner starting at B-Back since Dwyer (Snoddy never got the footwork down and moved to A-Back).
We also still had Cottrell, Lynch, and Searcy at AB these years. Although Qua and Lynch couldn’t contribute as much in the passing game as they did in 2016, they still were solid offensive weapons.
The o-line was solid for both years: Braun, Bryan, Cooper, Devine in 2017, Lee, Marshall, Stickler, etc.
Overall, the offensive flavor in these years was very much between the tackles, heavily weighted towards BB and QB runs, and without much threat of the vertical pass. Although we hit Brad Stewart late in the 2018 UGA game, we probably would have thrown much more with Tevin, or Justin, or Vad, behind center against that defense. Notably, the 2018 rotation had Stewart
and young Malachi Carter and Jalen Camp.
The fact that 2017-2018 were statically superior to a 2008 lineup featuring Bebe, Dwyer, and Nesbit is crazy, of course, but the overall more interesting fact is that we were on an offensive upswing from 2016 and might have continued improving the next year with one of the other QBs battling with Tobias.