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Why should we be optimistic about the OL for next year? The jimmies and joes haven't changed all that much for 2020 and we went from effective to abysmal in year 1 of this staff.

I’m not sure if optimistic is the word I’d use, considering I’ve been essentially screaming from a roof-top that the offensive line remains by biggest concern by a longshot. But there are some reasons that things could improve in year two after mustering only 879 team rushing yards in 2019. That total was the worst of the modern era of West Virginia football and a total of 70 individual running backs across the college football landscape generated more yards than that a season ago. Ouch.

It wasn’t all on the offensive line, as the running backs and blocking from other positions struggled as well, but they certainly didn’t help matters especially on the interior of the line. Looking back at things, it isn’t hard to see why the unit struggled at times (although that doesn’t quite explain how bad it was). The Mountaineers were down their best interior player pretty much from the jump and were forced to use a mixture of young or inexperienced options to try and fill that void.

That didn’t work out well, as the program cycled through so many different options and struggled to find any consistency. Some of that was due to inexperience, some of it was simply due to those players not being physically ready to handle those roles but there was nobody else to do it, so somebody had to.