There may not be any practice going on for the Buckeyes right now, but there is still jockeying happening every single day.
This is especially true at a position where there wasn’t much of anything definitive coming out of spring ball.
The Ohio State offensive line left camp without knowing who their starting five were going to be. This was due to players not locking up jobs, injuries, improving play from young guys, and just an overall inability to get the full picture of what the Buckeyes will be up front in 2018.
But how things ended in the spring are not how they have to begin when fall camp starts in a month. The situation is fluid and things can change even without a single practice taking place.
“Absolutely, there’s no doubt,” OSU offensive line coach Greg Studrawa said this spring. “Because at the end of spring some of these young guys who haven’t had as many reps as the older guys before, you see leaps and bounds in what they’re doing, so over the summer and then 30 more practices, oh yeah, they can catch fire and all of a sudden now have confidence in themselves.”
For an offensive lineman, size and strength is a prerequisite, but until they can put those attributes to good use with understanding and confidence, they’ll never be as good as they could be. Once that understanding melds with technique, then things can begin to blossom. And that doesn’t necessarily have to happen in camp.
“When you don’t know what you’re doing, or you don’t have a good technique down or a fundamental base of what you’re doing, you look tentative as an offensive lineman,” Studrawa explained. “‘Oh, he’s terrible. Oh, he’s soft.’ No he’s not. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. And when you find out what you’re doing, and you start doing it with a little bit of confidence, you grow in leaps and bounds really quickly.”
Spring camp and fall camp can be a blur for players. The time in between, however, allows players the ability to process everything they have learned.
Studrawa saw that from the end of the 2016 season to the start of spring camp this year. He expects similar progressions as the Buckeyes move toward fall camp in the coming weeks. If one player makes more progress than another, the depth chart could be very different than it was at the end of April.
“That’s what happened with Wyatt Davis, same way. Thayer Munford, same way. Josh Myers, same way. Gavin Cupp, same way. Malcolm Pridgeon, now you’ve got reps, same way,” he said. “So those things can happen and when they get that confidence, the jumps come in big, big jumps. So yeah, I have seen that.”