re: Can we get backups/depth from transfer portal?

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Wingo did and ended up being awesome

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For sure - but Wingo wasn't really coming in to be a depth piece; he was one of the top portal guys last season, coming off a freshman all-SEC team appearance. And even with Maason Smith IN the picture, he'd have played "starter" level snaps.


If Maason Smith hadn't gone down immediately, you'd have seen much more of a rotation on the DL. At the two interior spots, you can have two guys each playing like 90% of the snaps, or you can have 3 guys each playin 66% of the snaps, or you can have 4 guys each playing half.


Based on the way that House runs his defense (lots of sim pressures; pass-rush coming from different places all over the field; lots of different pre-snap pictures for the QB to sort through, oftentimes tied to different personnel packages), I would hazard a guess that he'd MUCH prefer something closer to the deep rotation of DL guys. We didn't rotate a ton or use a ton of different looks this year because (1) we didn't have quality rotational depth, and (2) ojulari was really too good (relative to the alternatives at that spot) to rotate off the field all that often. (Note: this is also why it took a while to find snaps for perkins - we were reluctant to "waste" him at buck because it would've meant taking out our other best defensive player, and were hesitant to just put him at ILB straight-up because he wasn't quite ready for the mental aspect. We eventually just had to tailor one of the ILB spots to his strengths, giving him simplified duties).



But starting next year--assuming we can round out our depth (roy coming back would be huge, as would adding a quality transfer, as would getting even just ONE breakout from the young guys) then I would be you see TONS of rotation and TONS of different DL looks.


The fact that Maason Smith projects to be able to legitimately handle any of the three down-lineman spots in House's defense gives us SO much flexibility--IF we can round out the rotation with quality depth. If we cant do that, then we'll have to stick to a shallow, basic rotation again.