Over at Dawgs247, Jake Rowe takes a stab at putting together a post-signing day offensive depth chart for 2017. It’s certainly an entertaining read. It’s no surprise to see a lot of young faces on that side of the ball filling up the two deep.
The two most interesting questions Rowe’s projection raise are (1) will the staff redshirt Jake Fromm? and (2) who is Pittman going to pick to start at right tackle?
I am not one of those who thinks Fromm has a serious chance of unseating Jacob Eason (Heisman Trophy candidate!) as the starter. You just went through [euphemism alert!] a throwaway season partly because you tossed a true freshman quarterback to the SEC wolves. Why would you want to conduct that experiment all over again?
That being said, you would think the optimum approach with Fromm would be to give him a redshirt, which would create another year’s worth of separation between him and Eason while also giving him a full season to get acclimated to the college game. Redshirt freshmen quarterbacks have done better in their first seasons at Georgia than have true freshmen at the position.
The question is whether the staff will have the luxury of giving Fromm the time to do so. It’s pretty clear at this point that nobody thinks Brice Ramsey is an answer as the backup. (For that matter, it’s not exactly clear what Ramsey, who will graduate this spring, intends to do about his future at Georgia.) It’ll be an interesting development to watch.
So will the fight at right tackle. Notice that Rowe has six names listed at the position. Four of those names are freshmen. Given that one of those names is D’Marcus Hayes, who is more likely to start at left tackle, you would think the odds are pretty good that Pittman may be doing something we haven’t seen in a while, which is turning over a starting tackle slot to a freshman. Can any of the newbies handle the responsibility?