"Who would you rank as the coaches most important to UGA's success?"
A DawgsCentral user posting under the name PiousMonken posed that question to me in the spring of 2023, and I quickly realized that a good answer would require quite a bit of consideration.
When thinking about the question, I kept coming back to an old football cliche, "It's not the X's and the O's, but the Jimmys and the Joes that make the difference." I found myself considering the players who suit up on Saturdays. Good gameplans and great play calls are key to the success of any college football program, but they are usually only as good as the personnel executing them. With that in mind, I decided to broaden the scope of the rankings beyond members of the coaching staff.
It sparked a series of longform articles called 23 For 2023. The premise was simple- Profile the 23 people who were most important to Georgia’s success on the gridiron in 2023. To create such a list, one must make value judgments on what on and off-field assets are most important to a modern college football program.
It focused on players and coaches within the UGA program. Collectively, the series served as a giant preview for the season ahead. It became a favorite of subscribers, and it forced me to ask questions that I hadn’t before.
This year, I am bringing the list back once again. Naturally, it will be called 24 for 2024.
With his former mentor now manning a microphone on ESPN, Kirby Smart is college football’s most accomplished coach. In 2024, Smart will have to navigate significant staff turnover and seismic changes within the sport itself. Georgia came up short of a third straight national championship in 2023, but winning it all this season would give the Bulldogs three titles in four years. That achievement would cement the program as a modern dynasty.
Whether or not Georgia can reach that lofty pedestal, and how they go about trying to do it, will be largely influenced by the roles these 24 individuals play.
Today we continue the rankings with #12 and #11. The first entries in this series were not paywalled, but they are now. Let’s get after it…
Previous Entries
#23 - Will a True Nose Tackle emerge for the Dawgs?
#16 - Trevor Etienne + #15 - Josh Crawford
#14 - Daniel Harris + #13 - Donte Williams
#12 - Earnest Greene + #11 Stacy Searels
When Kirby Smart hired Stacy Searels from North Carolina for his second stint as Georgia’s offensive line coach there was a great deal of angst among Bulldog Nation.
That UGA was searching for an offensive line coach at all was fairly unexpected to begin with. Matt Luke had been in charge of the unit since shortly after he was fired at Ole Miss in December of 2019. At just 45 years old, Luke chose to step away from football to spend time with his family. He left the program after winning the 2021 national championship with the Bulldogs, but he came back to the coaching profession this year when he joined Dabo Swinney's staff at Clemson.
The college football coaching carousel was basically done spinning by the time Luke formally announced he was stepping away. Most staffs were already settled and moving towards spring practice, which limited the candidate pool for Smart.
Georgia first targeted Baylor OL coach Eric Mateos. At the time of the search, sources told DawgsCentral that a verbal agreement had been reached for Mateos to join the staff in Athens. UGA had already drafted a memorandum of understanding when Mateos had a change of heart and decided to stay at Baylor. Smart then targeted Searels and hired him away from UNC.
Searels was the right man at the right time for Georgia
The hire was met with a lukewarm reception from some in the UGA fanbase. Searels was Mark Richt’s offensive line coach and run game coordinator for four years in the late 2000’s. His tenure started out with a bang in 2007, as the Bulldogs rode Knowshon Moreno to a Sugar Bowl win and a #2 ranking in the final AP poll. Things regressed from there. UGA was ranked #1 in the 2008 preseason, but a young offensive line was among the things that sank the Bulldogs.
The 2009 Dawgs ranked 58th in the FBS in rush yards per game while struggling to an 8-5 record. In 2010 the run game again sputtered and ranked just 76th in the nation with only 140.5 rush yards a game. Searels came under fire by some media personalities and certain factions of the fanbase. The criticism blamed him for UGA’s failures in the run game, but how responsible he was for UGA’s problems at that time is very debatable. Searels took a job as the Texas OL coach after a 10-6 loss to UCF in the Liberty Bowl.
Many Georgia fans had memories of those dark days bubble back up when the Searels hire was announced. It also didn’t help that the unit Searels coached at UNC in 2021 gave up 3.9 sacks per game. That number was 3rd worst in the FBS.
As is almost always the case, Kirby Smart knew a thing or two that the public did not. Searels is one of the more decorated OL coaches in college football today. He played tackle for Auburn and was an All-American for the Tigers in 1987. He joined his alma mater as a grad assistant from 1992-1993 and then became the OL coach at Appalachian State. The Mountaineers were an FCS program in those days, and he honed his craft under legendary coach Jerry Moore from 1994-2000 before taking the same position at Cincinnati.
When Nick Saban needed to replace George Yarno following the 2002 season, it was Searels, then a young up and coming coach, who he tabbed to come down to Baton Rouge. The next year the Tigers won a national title. Kirby Smart joined Saban’s staff as the defensive backs coach the next season, serving under LSU defensive coordinator Will Muschamp.
2004 was a long time ago, but Smart was familiar with Searels and had worked with him before. In hindsight, there are a few boxes that Searels checked that made him a very logical and uniquely qualified hire for the Bulldogs.
The first box was personality... Searels had the aforementioned familiarity with coaches already on staff. Smart knew what he was getting and knew Searels would work well with the personalities he had already assembled. As Kirby Smart has matured as a coach we have seen him prioritize internal staff dynamics more and more. Good recruiters have been allowed to walk if they didn’t fit in well with the other personalities on hand.
After UGA beat Oregon to start 2022, Smart said the following… "Our staff is the best it's ever been. We've got a great staff right now and it's awesome because we've got a great...we've always had a good staff, but we've got a really great staff right now in terms of guys enjoying the work together and putting plans together, and I thought they did a great job of doing that… The buy-in of those four coaches. The alignment. The understanding of this program's bigger than me and that I'll sacrifice for the program. They understand their role. They've done what they've been asked to do and they embrace it and there is a lot of positive energy and enthusiasm at practice...and it works. So it's created a really good kind of connection amongst the staff…”
Some didn’t love the addition of Searels, which was a bit ironic considering how Georgia fans saw his hiring away from LSU as a coup when Richt brought him aboard in 2007. When he came aboard it struck me as relevant that Richt and Mack Brown had both hired him twice and that Smart was clearly happy to work with him again. Put simply, Searels has a reputation as a really good guy. We didn’t know when he was hired that Mike Bobo would become the offensive coordinator a year later, but it’s an added bonus that those two have worked together in the past as well.
The second box was also personality in a way, but this time it related to retention… Searels walked into an offensive line room that was a bit unsettled. Some talented players were considering transferring and hadn’t meshed well with Luke. On the field, Searels had two excellent starting tackles in Broderick Jones and Warren McClendon. In the middle of his unit was one of the team’s strongest leaders, Sedrick Van Pran. It took some time for Searels and the players he inherited to really feel each other out, but pretty soon they started to click. By the time UGA hit October, sources said that the offensive line room was functioning better than it had in years. Searels is an excellent communicator who excels at figuring out how to motivate his players and understands how to reach a wide range of personalities. He brought stability and calm to the unit.
The third box is scheme… Searels has done a ton of work over the years on a lot of different units, and the man knows offensive line play like few do. I have written a lot in the past about the diversification of Georgia’s run schemes. When Sam Pittman left Athens for Arkansas, Kirby Smart made the decision to move away from the zone-heavy attack that relied on his linemen to always win against the man across from them. That zone based rushing attack struggled in 2019, and Smart wanted to freshen things up. He hired Luke, an offensive line coach with a lot of experience running gap scheme attacks that got his linemen pulling across the formation and moving downfield.
The philosophical switch required Georgia to recruit a different type of offensive lineman than it had under Pittman. The Bulldogs needed the size they had always craved up front, but they also needed players who were quick enough to pull into a hole and decleat a linebacker scraping into the hole.
In 2019, Georgia ran zone scheme on 84% of his runs. That bumped down to 71% in 2020. Then in 2021 the Dawgs transformed to a team that was 51.7% zone scheme and 48.3% gap scheme. In 2022, UGA kept on the same path with 53% zone runs and 47% gap.
When Luke was hired, he helped oversee the installation of more gap scheme concepts. It gave UGA a release valve when its zone run game was being stood up by an opponent’s defensive line (think James Cook’s long run late in the 3rd quarter of the 2021 national championship game).
The ability to execute gap and zone at equally effective levels became a defining characteristic of the UGA program during its rise to the top of the sport. It made the Bulldogs a nightmare for a defense to prepare for, and it is quite rare to see a team that doesn’t rely on one or the other the vast majority of the time.
Searels oversaw some excellent rushing attacks at UNC. His 2020 unit paved the way for two RB’s who gained over 1,000 yards and averaged 7+ yards per carry. His 2021 group also had two rushers with over 1,000 yards. More important than those numbers is how they were achieved. The 2020 UNC team was 60% zone scheme and in 2021 the Tar Heels were 58% zone. Those numbers aren’t quite as even as Georgia’s were when he was hired, but Searels was overseeing a unit that deployed both schemes frequently and executed them well. That is rare in college football, and it made him uniquely qualified to work with Todd Monken at Georgia.
Despite the initial reactions, Searels has ended up being a perfect fit for this Georgia program at this time. His personality meshes well and his understanding of the game is excellent. It was Searels who got on the headset in Columbia, Missouri in October of 2022 and urged Todd Monken to call more gap scheme runs to help his offensive linemen out. That shift led to UGA’s rushing attack finding its footing, and it allowed Georgia to grab a late come from behind victory.
When he joined the program there were concerns about his recruiting, but Searels has been as effective on the trail as any member of Georgia's staff. Some questioned the lack of five-star linemen he had signed in the past, but he landed 5-star OT Monroe Freeling in his first full cycle. By doing so, Searels took the #1 player in South Carolina out of the state.
In the 2024 recruiting cycle, Searels signed a class that became known as "The Great Wall of Georgia." The late-cycle addition of 6'10" former basketball player Jahzare Jackson gave the Bulldogs 7 signees on the OL. The group includes four-stars Daniel Calhoun, Michael Uini, Marques Easley, and Nyier Daniels. They are joined by three-stars Marcus Harrison and Malachi Toliver. The average size of those 7 players is 6'6.5" and 345 pounds. That's an insane amount of beef up front, and the offensive line might be the unit where the Dawgs have the least questions in the years to come. That's a tremendous luxury in a line of scrimmage league like the SEC, and it's hard to overstate how much of a separator it creates between UGA and everyone else.
Jackson hadn't played football before this year, but his footwork has been impressive and Georgia thinks he will be a valuable player for them down the road. Calhoun was the highest ranked OL signee and he showed why during spring practice. Heading into the 2024 season, it appears the true freshman is likely to rotate in with the first-team offense.
After signing a class of 7 players, it'd be understandable if UGA's OL recruiting took a bit of a step backwards in the 2025 cycle. Searels has already grabbed commitments from four-stars Juan Gaston, Cortez Smith and Mason Short.
Assessing 2023's Unit
When healthy, Georgia's 2023 offensive line was one of the most effective of the Smart era. The Bulldogs essentially had a six-man starting lineup, with LT Earnest Greene, C Sedrick Van Pran, RG Tate Ratledge and RT Amarius Mims surrounding the LG duo of Dylan Fairchild and Micah Morris. That group gave up just 41 pressures, but Mims was rarely healthy. His replacement was Xavier Truss, who played 409 pass block snaps and allowed a team high 22 pressures on the season.
Much has been made of the impact that UGA's injuries had on the SEC Championship game. The injury to Mims may have been bigger than the ones to Ladd McConkey or Brock Bowers. Truss struggled to block star Alabama pass rushers Dallas Turner and Chris Braswell. Both were taken in the first two rounds of the NFL Draft, and the threat of them wrecking the game changed Georgia's play calling dramatically following the departure of Mims. As UGA's offense got more conservative, Bama keyed on the run more and more. The Dawgs rallied in the second half with more aggressive play calling, but the quarter of low tempo offense came back to bite them as the clock hit zero before they could get the ball back to mount a final drive.
It was Earnest Greene, a redshirt freshman in 2023, who was supposed to be the big question mark on the OL coming into last season. In reality, Greene gave up 8 pressures in his first three starts against UT-Martin, UAB and South Carolina, and then allowed just 6 pressures over the next 11 games to end the year. The only sack he allowed all season came in UGA's SEC Championship loss against Alabama.
A national brand attracting national recruits
Greene being on the roster is noteworthy in that he is a product of the machine that Kirby Smart has built in Athens. He is a native of Los Angeles, and came to UGA from St. John Bosco High School. Bosco is a football factory that has fed the rosters of blue blood programs West of the Mississippi for decades. Pete Carroll built a dynasty at USC in the early 2000’s with players from Bosco and their arch rival in the Mater Dei. The school has produced five-star QB’s like Josh Rosen and DJ Uiagaleilei and it is constantly swarming with coaches from the Pac-12 and Big 10.
There are plenty of skill players and QB’s who come out of high schools that lie West of Texas, but there is a shortage of big athletic linemen like Greene. California schools produce a lot of D1 football players but states like Georgia, Florida, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama produce a much higher percentage of elite offensive and defensive linemen. For schools like USC, Washington and Oregon to thrive they need to keep elite linemen like Earnest Greene from the SEC. The best players in the South tend to stay in the South. Schools like Oklahoma and Ohio State also need to get a good chunk of the talent produced out West.
Georgia has shown it can be an elite program by putting a fence around its own state and taking one or two of the best players from surrounding states every cycle. Kirby Smart has built UGA into a burgeoning dynasty by dominating the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball. UGA is already better up front than any program in the sport, so seeing the Bulldogs come into SoCal to take a player like Greene is the type of thing that makes the rest of college football quiver in its boots.
Historically, only a select few programs are able to pull California kids out of the region. Alabama did it under Nick Saban. Ohio State has a lot of talent from the West Coast and Arizona on its roster too. UGA beat both of those programs for Greene.
So, why did Smart and Georgia travel over 2,000 miles for his pledge? First off, his versatility in high-school was a good indicator that he could be successful in UGA’s scheme. He played at 6’5” and 330 pounds and saw snaps at both tackle positions and on the interior of the line. He’s leaned out some since getting to Athens, but at 320 he has a blend of size and quickness that allows him to get to the second level and flatten defenders.
Greene plays fast. Even in short yardage situations you will see plays where he chips the DE and then flattens a LB at the second level. When he showed up in Athens I immediately heard buzz about him. Part of that is his natural physical gifts, but his natural processing ability on the field stood out in 2023.
He is not just a big man hitting whatever is in front of him. He plays savvily and picks out his defenders on both pulls and zone blocking runs. In pass protection he has good feet and gets out of his stance quickly. The most impressive technical aspect of his game is the way Greene uses his hands. He has strong hands and uses them to knock defenders off their paths without ever really reaching. When he puts hands on a defensive lineman it looks like he’s delivering a quick punch. That’s something that usually takes years of college coaching to develop.
Looking towards 2024
If you've read this site for awhile now then you know what we believe about line play in modern football, but in case you're new let's recap our overriding ethos- Football is still played form the inside out.
I get that the SEC is no longer filled with I-Formation offenses and 8-man boxes, but games are still won and lost in the trenches. Spread offenses and RPO's have changed the face of the sport, but the quickest way to dominate a game is at the line of scrimmage. If you can't block an opponent there won't be enough time to run vertical passing routes. If you can't stop the run on defense then nothing else will matter.
The 2024 Georgia offensive line is replacing Mims and Sedrick Van Pran, a program leader and three-year starter at Center. The good news for UGA is that there appears to be plenty of talent waiting in the wings.
Van Pran will be replaced by Jared Wilson, a redshirt junior who saw action in 9 games last year. He was closely tutored by Van Pran and teammates believe he is even more athletic than his predecessor. Wilson has earned the confidence of Georgia's staff and gained solid experience last year by playing 131 snaps. He will have to prove his consistency, but he showed flashes of excellence last year. Wilson even pancaked projected top ten pick Deone Walker of Kentucky late in UGA's win over the Wildcats. Wilson has battled an achilles strain throughout fall camp, and his status for the opener is questionable at this time.
Tate Ratledge returns at Right Guard after a stellar 2023 where he reached his five-star potential. He was dominant as a pass blocker, giving up just 5 pressures on 399 snaps in pass protection. He's been cross-training at Center throughout fall camp and could start there against Clemson if Wilson isn't ready to go.
At the Left Guard position, Dylan Fairchild and Micah Morris will again split reps. Both showed the ability to be dominant at times in 2023. Fairchild gave up 5 pressures in 301 pass block snaps and Morris allowed 3 pressures in 209 pass snaps. In True Pass Sets (no play-action, rollout or screens), Morris gave up 2 less pressures than Fairchild (4).
Georgia is also likely to play freshman Daniel Calhoun at times with the first-team as well. Calhoun enrolled early and already has the makings of a dominant interior lineman in the SEC.
Greene's importance at tackle is hard to overstate. Not only does he cover the blind side of a QB who could be the top pick in the 2025 NFL Draft, he is also UGA's clear #1 tackle.
Truss looks like he will start the season at Right Tackle. The question is whether or not he will take another step forward in his sixth year of college football. Truss's 409 pass block snaps were the fourth most on the 2023 UGA team. His 22 pressures allowed were 8 more than the Bulldog who gave up the next most. His PFF Pass Block Grade was 59.9, which was over ten points lower than any other UGA OL who played 50 or more pass block snaps last year. He also gave up 17 pressures in 109 True Pass Set snaps. No other Bulldog allowed more than 6 pressures in True Pass Set snaps.
With Carson Beck at QB, UGA has a chance to have a dynamic downfield passing game. The Bulldogs will need Truss to get better at blocking elite edge rushers when Beck is waiting on slower developing routes to come open.
If Truss can't take another leap in 2024 then former five-star Monroe Freeling needs to make one of his own. Freeling was a five-star recruit in the 2023 class, and is now in his second fall camp at Georgia. He gave up 6 pressures in 77 pass block snaps last season, which is not great. Freeling has plenty of talent and went through another body transformation this summer, but he will have to show much more to make a case for starting over Truss.
After Freeling, rising sophomore Jamal Merriweather appears to lead the group of youngsters trying to make their way up the depth chart.
The 2023 Bulldogs moved back towards more of a zone rushing attack. The Bulldogs ran gap scheme on just 33% of their attempts, and I openly wondered throughout the season if that strategy was due to the personnel Georgia had or the preferences of Mike Bobo. We saw Kendall Milton heat up down the stretch as UGA fed him more and more carries on zone runs. On the flip side, Daijun Edwards began to run more gap scheme as the season wore on. Against Missouri in Week 10, Edwards had 12 zone runs and 4 gap carries. At Tennessee, he had 7 gap and 4 zone runs. There wasn't a game where he had more zone than gap runs for the rest of the season. Before that UT game on November 18, Edwards had more zone runs than gap runs in every game he played in.
Georgia's 2024 RB room should go four deep with Trevor Etienne, Roderick Robinson, Branson Robinson and true freshman five-star Nate Frazier. That group has a diverse enough skill set that Bobo should be able to deploy whatever run scheme split he prefers. It will be interesting to see if the Bulldogs get back towards a more even split of gap and zone or continue running over two-thirds zone scheme.
Both Morris and Fairchild graded out slightly better on gap runs than zone runs in 2023. The same is true for Greene. Truss and Ratledge have been better zone scheme blockers to this point in their careers. Wilson's sample set is too small to judge, but everyone close to the program raves about his speed and athleticism. In theory, that should make him a strong blocker when pulling in gap runs.
With a full offseason working together as a starting unit, Searels and Bobo should have had ample time to improve how this unit blocks in their preferred runs. Calhoun has thrown his hat in the ring and Freeling is pushing his way into the conversation for snaps as well. No OL is going to execute every run (or pass) play perfectly, but UGA has known what the core of this unit will look like for months. They should have had time to perfect the bread and butter run plays that Bobo wants to build into the foundation of his offense. Searels has built lots of units that excelled at busting big runs open on gap scheme plays after leaning on the opponent's defense with some zone runs early. If Georgia can do both effectively it will allow them to counter opponents who key on one scheme or try to overload one side of the formation with extra defenders.
Dynasties start and end in the trenches
What has made Smart’s program so dominant in this era of football is the way it has been built from the inside out. Spread formations and vertical passing attacks rule the day, but Georgia’s dominance on the line of scrimmage is the closest thing that exists to a variance eraser. Searels is responsible for keeping the Dawgs dominant at the point of attack. His recruiting has ensured that UGA has the talent to make sure that happens for years to come.
If Searels can get his 2024 unit to reach its ceiling then Georgia could field the best offense it has had under Kirby Smart. The UGA front five will have big athletic bodies that can move. That should give Searels and Bobo the ability to create run lanes with both power and leverage. They should also be able to ensure that Carson Beck feels confident in the pocket. If that happens, the Dawgs will be very hard to beat in 2024.
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