(06-14-2017, 09:25 AM)Farm93 link Wrote:SJSU #1 - The theme about importance lost a bit of credibility right there.
I agree with the thought that the statement itself says nothing at all about the importance of this stat for improvement going forward.
Much more serious in that regard is the article's own description of last year's #1 in this stat, Bowling Green, which then proceeded to have serious declines in it's offensive output across the board. I would assume that across the board the correlation would be better, but Steele makes no attempt to make the case.
A bigger criticism would be that Steele never says just what he thinks this state tells us. Presumably its not absolute performance of the OL - no one thinks San Jose State (#1) or UCF (#5) is going to have a better OL straight up than, say, Alabama (#60) or Michigan (#80). Something closer would be improvement over last year, but that would likely involve some kind of comparison of this year's experience vs last year's. More likely it tells us something about how close the players might perform versus their own potential; that's rather vague but pretty sure Alabama's OL personnel have a higher ceiling than SJSU's.
I also always wonder about the accuracy of Steele's numbers, though in this case he seems pretty close at least with respect to Stanford - I counted 69 returning starts vs his 68.
Broadly speaking, I would say it's rather obvious that experience on the OL is important. However, it is probably not linear in the manner this statistic suggests. By that I mean that some experience, and more importantly experience together, clearly is important. But, two years of experience is not twice better than one year. Further, three guys together for one year is far more useful to developing synchronization than one guy having three years of experience.
With four returning starters from the end of last year, and six guys who have started on the roster, Stanford seems well positioned to perform closer to their own potential than did last year's unit, which had two returning starters, and I think two who had ever started. However, of the guys on the roster as of spring, I have some concerns as to just how high that potential is.
