Clearly, patience isn’t a virtue fired Kansas University head football coach Charlie Weis had when trying and failing to assemble an offensive line capable of keeping sleek Big 12 behemoths from fooling with the best-laid plans.
Weis inherited a roster from Turner Gill woefully lacking in offensive-line prospects and made the situation worse by not having the discipline to lay off shortcuts. He signed junior-college blockers, and look at what a horrible mess he left behind.
Somebody should do a study on the rate of chiropractor visits made by Big 12 officials the week after working a Kansas game. Bending over to pick up all those flags they toss is no way to keep back spasms at bay. Momentum-killers, just about every one of them.
Kansas was so thin at the offensive tackle positions that Damon Martin started the season at right tackle and looked more like a guard, but still easily was the best option. He developed an illness, and junior-college transfer Larry Mazyck took his place. False starts and holding penalties at alarming rates have dogged him. Both starting guards and the left tackle are seniors, so next season doesn’t shape up any better on paper.
The long-term success to building an offensive line lies in recruiting high school players, sometimes from other positions, and then building their bodies, their minds, their techniques.
“I think about all those old jokes,” interim head coach Clint Bowen said. “You take those O-linemen and put them in the dark room and don’t kind of think about them for a few years and then pull them out and they’re ready to go.”
In the NFL, players come ready-made and are selected by general managers who consult with scouts and the coaching staff. In college, recruiting the right guys requires having the ability to project what the athlete will look like a few years down the road and getting a feel for his mind, how much it can absorb, how well synced it is with the body.
“You take a corner, the guy’s athletic and fast and has some natural God-given ability,” offensive line coach John Reagan said. “You can throw him out there to play. He doesn’t get into physical mismatches. But at O-line, it’s one of those true areas where development is critical. The longer you can keep them in your system to where everything is more familiar with them, obviously, the better.”
We’re living in a microwave culture. We want the world, and we want it now. We’re fooling ourselves constantly.
“There are not a whole lot of quick fixes to anything in life, and there certainly are not when it comes to football and even more so when it’s offensive linemen,” Reagan said.
Anthony Collins and Tanner Hawkinson played for Reagan and went onto the NFL. Neither came to KU as an O-lineman.
“A.C. was a defensive end who would never play offensive line if his life depended on it when he first came out of high school,” Reagan said.
Hawkinson came to KU as a tight end, was moved to defensive end and then to left tackle, where he started as a red-shirt freshman.
Third-year sophomore Jordan Shelley-Smith was moved from tight end to right tackle in August and has moved up to No. 2 on the depth chart. He played for a stretch in place of Mazyck in his hometown Waco, Texas, on Saturday.
“He was playing decently against Baylor and had a little bit of a bang up that I think he’ll be back from, but I’ve been encouraged with him,” Reagan said. “He’s one of those guys typical of some of the things we did before in building a line. He wasn’t a lineman, obviously, he was a tight end who made the transition, so he’s a little bit more athletic. You bulk him up. He has some athletic ability that some of these guys who start inside don’t necessarily have. So, hopefully, that will be something we will be able to develop.”
There is that word again: develop.
