Mailbag 234: How can Auburn build a better OL in this new era?
This week: Wide receiver types, Xavier Atkins, Steven Pearl, Kaden Magwood, college sports reform, toys and songs
AUBURN — Welcome back to the mailbag. This will likely be the final one for 2025, meaning we’ve now gotten through another calendar year of doing this on a (mostly) weekly basis.
It’s wild to think that a feature that I started almost a decade and two different sites ago has grown into something that has been a staple of my work and my life.
I’m going to be honest up front: This week has been a tough one. As I mentioned a few days ago, my wife’s grandmother — a massive Auburn fan and the most loyal supporter anybody could find on this planet — passed away. I’ve spent a lot of this week with her family in Montgomery, and work has taken a backseat to all of it.
By the time most of you read this, I’ll be heading to Indianapolis for Auburn basketball’s big-time matchup against Purdue. We’ll have a podcast previewing that either Friday night or Saturday morning, along with a Stretch 4 for the game itself. We’ll have postgame Observations on Sunday, and I’ll try to get another podcast in before I get back to Alabama on Sunday night for a memorial service on Monday.
But I wanted to make sure I had a mailbag this week because I wanted to feel some normalcy. And I want to thank everybody who asked a question or decided to open this newsletter and read it. It means a lot all the time, because this is an independent outlet that runs solely off of y’all. Yet it means a lot more this week.
I wasn’t able to get to every single question this week, so I’ll have a backlog to get to by the next time we do one of these. We get to start by diving really deep into a question from a longtime Observer subscriber about a massive topic, and we cover ground in both football and basketball before some Christmas-themed closers.
Thanks again for making all of this possible. Merry Christmas. Let’s go.
There’s a common denominator to all of Auburn Football’s mediocrity beginning in 2018: awful offensive line play. Once Braden Smith departed for the NFL, quarterbacks’ having a clean pocket is a rarity, and it’s not uncommon for a back’s first contact to be behind the line of scrimmage.
Finger pointing is futile, but Gus thought he could convert imported basketball players to defensive ends to offensive tackles; Harsin didn’t recruit at all; and Freeze spent seven figures on a portal tackle who couldn’t hear or block.
Malzahn’s neglect of that position group was the beginning of his downfall. What does the new regime need to do to sign and develop blue-chip OL talent?
Kev
It’s no secret that Auburn’s lack of recruiting, retaining and developing high-quality offensive line talent led to the end of the Gus Malzahn era and has partially defined the last two eras under Bryan Harsin and Hugh Freeze. While quarterback play and offensive production in general have also been prominent issues, the offensive line has felt like the most consistently troubling aspect of this program on the field.
Braden Smith is the last great offensive line product from Auburn, yes. He was drafted all the way back in 2018. I would also point out that the converted basketball-playing defensive lineman, Prince Tega Wanogho, is one of the only offensive linemen Auburn has had since Smith left who graded out well and got any All-SEC honors. The other one was Jack Driscoll, and he was a UMass grad transfer before the portal was even a thing.
And I think that’s been the biggest issue for Auburn: You might have a single guy who stands out on a particular offensive line, but you haven’t had multiple in a while. Connor Lew graded out well, particularly in his sophomore season of 2024. But did Auburn get good offensive line play from others? Not consistently, no.
Pro Football Focus grades aren’t the gospel truth, yet I find it telling that Auburn didn’t have a single regular offensive lineman who had a quality mark of 70 or above this season. In fact, Lew in 2024 is the only one for Auburn since 2021, when Brodarious Hamm got there. Marquel Harrell made the cut in 2019. But those were solo efforts.
Meanwhile, look at the better offensive lines in the SEC this season. Alabama and Georgia had three offensive linemen with those 70+ grades. Missouri, Texas, Texas A&M and Tennessee each had two. Again, Auburn didn’t have a single one of those.
So, in this day and age of the transfer portal, with players able to leave at any moment, how do you build great offensive linemen — especially in the SEC?