I assume you mean 2012 (not 2015). I also tried to throw out the disclaimer that it was a very rudimentary way of looking at it. Actually, for some reason I thought we were talking about 2012 vs. 2021, which is why I made the comparison I did.
But, I will say that I'm pretty sure there was some point in the 2012 season (Penn State maybe?) where we lost 2 starting lineman for the season (?) in the same game?
I would also throw out there that our RB's that year were Weisman and Bullock...I feel like Goodson and IKM would compare favorably with those 2.
I will agree that JVB was a better QB than Petras. We saw what JVB could do in 2011 when he had a really good WR in McNutt.
I am not going to try to refute the argument that this season's failures fall on the OL and maybe more specifically, the OL recruiting. I've coached enough teams to know that it doesn't matter if you are running the Air Raid Face Melter A-11 Rocket offense, if you can't block anyone your offense isn't going anywhere.
Yeah, I'm not sure where Fryowa was going with that. In my opinion, this is the worst O line since 2012. The difference is that season had two starters and future stars (Scherff and Donnal) go down for the year against Penn State. Also, Damon Bullock wasn't anywhere near Tyler Goodson as a running back. And the OC was new, and trying to shoehorn players he didn't recruit into a new system. Well, sort of a new system, since he had to attempt to mesh his horizontal passing game with the Ferentz required zone blocking scheme.
So all those factors explain 2012's debacle of an offense. It's harder for me to wrap my head around this year's issues. They've known what horses were in the stable for a while now. There wasn't a new system being implemented. If the staff had concerns with the development of the offensive line, then the transfer portal was available to them. DeJong, Richman and Plumb are all out there playing - it's not like 2012 where two of them went down with season ending injuries.
So more than recruiting misses, this seems like an inability to assess the ability/development/readiness of guys who have already been on campus for a while. Unlike Davis in 2012, there isn't a new OC or a new scheme here. It is hard to understand how the staff could be so far off in evaluating their current roster in a position the head coach and OC supposedly specialize in.
I know we don't see practice so we are all out of our lanes here, but it is also hard to see how Padilla couldn't play some role. You'd hope that the staff would have assessed by August or even early September that the O-tackles simply weren't going to work with an immobile QB, and maybe started exploring some packages in which Padilla was inserted and put on the move with a lot of roll outs. Again, I get that we don't see practice, so we have no idea what the gap to Petras is here. Still, on paper you have a QB who has been on campus almost three years and talented enough to be offered by Georgia, smart enough to be offered by Ivy League schools, who can clearly move and throw on the run a ton better than Petras, and by many accounts (this is subjective) was the more accurate passer in the spring.
As I said, it's hard to wrap my head around how there can't be some kind of role or fit there....