THE DAWG CALLER: For the Dogs, the recent lack of Hogs up front

"So to have balance, you've got to have good depth on the offensive line, especially in this conference," Kirby Smart said five weeks ago at his hiring press conference. "You have to have big, grown men that need lots of depth, because it's hard to get through it without having injuries.”

At yesterday’s press conference, Coach Smart echoed those same sentiments: “We’ve got to improve the offensive line. We’ve got to get bigger people. We’ve got to get more depth.”

Lack of depth along the offensive line—it was a problem for Georgia clearly evident in 2015 stemming, according to many Bulldog enthusiasts, from Coach Richt and his staff’s lack of signing talent along the line.

But, comparatively speaking, is that entirely accurate? In the latter part of the Richt regime, did Georgia fail to sign enough quality offensive linemen?

Beginning with the Ray Goff era in 1989, since that’s around the time the NCAA limited Division I-A scholarships from 95 to 85 (and when Georgia began publishing game-by-game starters on a consistent basis), through 2015, I took note of every player signed by the Bulldogs whose primary position was on the offensive line.

Below are Georgia’s average annual signees and, of those, its average number of offensive line signees for four different periods: under Goff (1989-1995), Donnan (1996-2000), and Richt’s tenure split into two—Richt 1 (2001-2007) and Richt 2 (2008-2015):

I am still scratching my head, wondering how a program signs an average of nearly five offensive linemen over seven years (2001-2007) only to suddenly sign an average of almost one-and-a-half offensive linemen less over the next eight years (2008-2015). Nonetheless, I thought an additional measurement could be the average “quality” of the four era’s annual offensive line signees by figuring each lineman’s number of career starts while at Georgia.

Below, divided into the same eras, are the annual average number of career starts the signed offensive linemen would eventually total playing for the Bulldogs. For example, although Donnan’s staff signed just three offensive linemen in 1999—Josh Billue, Kevin Breedlove, and Alex Jackson—the trio made a combined total of 69 career starts (Billue-0, Breedlove-47, Jackson-22), which was one season worth of Donnan’s five-year total of 179 career starts that when divided by five years equals 35.8 offensive-line starts per signing class:

*** Obviously, I omitted the “Richt 2” period from above because there are signed offensive linemen from the past few years who will certainly make starts at Georgia. However, considering the program’s last three classes, whereupon only a combined 10 offensive linemen were signed, making a combined 40 career starts (Brandon Kublanow-26, Isaiah Wynn- 13, Dyshon Sims- 1), the “Richt 2” period’s total should eventually average out to far less than “Richt 1” and appear more like the career number of starts from the previous two eras, which begs the question:

Why in the last half of the Richt era did Georgia sign significantly fewer quality offensive linemen than before? And, was this lack of “depth” and “balance” partly to blame—even the slightest—for the program’s decline in success when compared to the initial era of the former head coach?