The 2017 Tennessee offensive line is one of the most experienced in the SEC

You often hear from coaches and commentators that football is a “line of scrimmage” game and that the SEC, in particular, is a “line of scrimmage” league. What they mean, of course, is that the game is largely decided on which team’s offensive and defensive lines win their respective battles.

We know this intuitively to be true. Taken to its logical extreme, if the offensive line could magically make the entire defensive line disappear on every play, that offense would have an advantage even with mediocre players at quarterback, running back, and receiver. And conversely, if the defensive line just rolls right through the offensive line, no amount of Heisman Trophy contenders in the backfield are going to save the day.

The coaches and commentators are not saying that the skill players aren’t important. They’re just reminding everyone that the players no one talks about are at least as important, and perhaps even more important, to the success of the team.

So if that’s true, why is it that the offensive line doesn’t get more attention?

Evaluating offensive lineman is time-consuming and difficult

Offensive linemen get less attention from casual fans and pundits because, frankly, there’s just not much for them to talk about. Most folks in the stands and in front of their televisions watch football by watching the football. After the center snaps the ball, all eyes are first on the quarterback, and then on either the running back or the receiver. The eyes follow the ball on Saturdays and the stats on Sundays, but even most of the stats follow the ball. So it’s easy for fans to talk about skill players because there are numbers at the ready to measure their performance.

Not so for offensive linemen. There are few easy stats adequately measuring their contributions that fans can toss back and forth in conversation. The explanation for the lack of such stats is that the real contributions of the offensive line are difficult to measure. Their value comes not from actually moving the ball but from creating opportunities for the skill guys by creating space or time.

So if offensive linemen don’t get noticed because they rarely touch the ball and therefore rarely end up in the box score, how do you evaluate them apart from actively studying their individual efforts on video or relying on the experts who do?

One way is to use the decisions of the coaching staff as a proxy. They are studying film, closely evaluating each player, and presumably, the best guys are earning the most playing time. So the number of games a player starts and the number of games in which he played should be a pretty good indication of how a staff values an offensive lineman. More games and more starts means more experience, and experience matters in football, especially along the offensive line. We’ll talk about the degree to which experience matters later, but first, let’s look at the relative experience of the offensive lines in the SEC.

Phil Steel’s SEC offensive line experience list

Yesterday, Phil Steele posted his compilation of offensive line experience, which is a ranking of teams by most career starts on the line. Here are the SEC teams:

So, according to that table, Tennessee has a pretty significant experience advantage over most of its SEC East rivals, with only South Carolina and Kentucky really coming close.

Gameday on Rocky Top’s SEC offensive line experience list

In compiling the Gameday on Rocky Top All-SEC team for our magazine, we, too, compiled a list of offensive line experience for the SEC teams. Ours included both starts and games played, and in that list Kentucky edged Tennessee for first place by a small margin. So our numbers are in general agreement with Phil Steele and show that Tennessee’s offensive line is in good shape this fall from an experience standpoint.

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Conclusion

The Vols’ offensive linemen for 2017 have played and started a lot of games in their careers. Being pressed into action early in their careers undoubtedly gives them experience, and experience presumably makes them better. At the very least, they should be better than they were before they gained the experience.

Of course, being the best on your team and the unit being better than it was last year says little about how good you are relative to other teams. For that, we’ll need to look at other factors, which we will get to in a later post.

For now, though, one thing is crystal clear: The 2017 Tennessee Volunteers have one of the most experienced offensive lines in the SEC.