How good was Auburn's offensive line in '21?
How Good or Bad was Auburn’s offensive line, really?
If you spend any amount of time on Auburn Twitter, Facebook Groups, or any forum where Auburn Football is regularly discussed there is a prevailing narrative with most fans.
The narrative? Auburn’s offensive line is terrible in pass protection.
Once upon a time, this used to be a somewhat subjective topic to discuss completely dependent on the beholder’s ability to be able to understand the complexities of pass protection. Fortunately in the modern-day era of advanced statistics sites like Pro Football Focus keep almost every statistic you can think of including a percentage of a QB’s dropbacks he is actually under pressure. How did Auburn’s line stack up vs their SEC’s peers? Let’s take a look at where each team’s unit ranks in terms of percentage of dropbacks with QB pressures allowed and how that QB fared with the protection he was afforded.
Note: Highlighted in bold are QBs that either took a majority of their team's snaps and didn’t finish as the starter or split significant time with other QBs during the season.
Miss St. - Will Rogers - 17.3% (73.3 completion percentage)
Georgia - Stetson Bennett - 25% (64% completion percentage)
Missouri - Connor Bazelak - 25.2% (64.9% completion percentage)
Auburn – Bo Nix - 26.6% (60.2 completion percentage)
Ole Miss - Matt Corral - 28.3% (66.6% completion percentage)
Kentucky - Will Levis - 29.1% (69.5% completion percentage)
South Carolina – Luke Doty – 30.1% (60.8% completion percentage)
Florida - Emory Jones - 30.3% (64.4% completion percentage)
Tennessee - Hendon Hooker - 31.1% (68.1% completion percentage)
Vanderbilt - Ken Seals - 32.1% (56.9% completion percentage)
Arkansas - KJ Jefferson - 32.6% (66.8% completion percentage)
South Carolina – Zeb Noland – 32.7% (54.7% completion percentage)
LSU - Max Johnson - 34.5% (59.9% completion percentage)
South Carolina - Doty, Brown, Noland - 35%
Alabama - Bryce Young - 35.3% (67.1% completion percentage)
Vanderbilt – Mike Wright – 35.7% (53.1% completion percentage)
Zach Calzada - 37.5% (55.9% completion percentage)
Auburn – TJ Finley - 38% (54.7% completion percentage)
South Carolina – Jason Brown – 43.1% (55% completion percentage)
The numbers tell us some quarterbacks were able to perform despite poor protection. For others, there was a direct correlation between good protection and a higher completion rate. What these numbers do not account for are passes dropped by wide receivers which might significantly affect completion percentage.
For Auburn better pass protection did not equate to a high completion percentage mostly due to having one of the highest drop rates in the league (33 total drops).
So how good or bad was Auburn’s offensive line in pass protection? The numbers suggest that there’s a lot of room for improvement no matter how you look at it but Auburn will undoubtedly need better play in the trenches in 2022.
