COLUMN: Ole Miss offensive line coach John Garrison is blessed with a lot of viable options in 2024

During spring training for the 2024 Ole Miss football team, it was easily determined the offensive line had a wealth of candidates for offensive line coach John Garrison to work with.

Even though North Carolina transfer tackle Diego Pounds, Southern Mississippi transfer guard Gerquan Scott and Rebel tackle Micah Pettus were limited during the 15-practice spring session, it was evident this is a deep room.

Coming out of spring, these are the top candidates for playing time this season in no particular order.

Junior tackle Jayden Williams, senior Washington transfer senior OG/OT Julius Buelow, senior center Caleb Warren, junior tackle Pettus, junior tackle Pounds, redshirt freshman center Brycen Sanders, senior OG Scott, Washington transfer senior guard/tackle Nate Kalepo, senior OG Eli Acker, senior OG/OT Jeremy James, senior center Reece McIntyre.

So now the question to ask is how much subbing/platooning is Garrison going to do in 2024?

Nobody has had the opportunity to ask Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin that since Spring to try to get a definitive answer, but let’s do a hypothetical for conversation and discussion.

Let’s say the first team is Williams at LT, Buelow at LG, Warren at center, James at RG and Pettus at RT. That’s a salty offensive line, but that also leaves a fine unit on the bench of LT Pounds, LG Scott, C Sanders/McIntyre, RG Acker and RT Kalepo.

The beauty of this is that James, Kalepo and Buelow have experience at tackle and guard, so a competent mix-and-match is relatively easy to configure.

Let’s say that’s how things shake out – and it might now be that at all because Pounds, Kalepo and Scott are all capable of getting in that first unit when the dust clears. For arguments sake, let’s say it ends like the above.

Will Garrison platoon whole lines regularly? Or will he sub one or two players at a time? Or will he go with his top five for most of the snaps?

The guess here – and it is strictly a guess – is that Garrison will sub liberally, but not whole lines at a time.

Coming to Ole Miss from Washington, the feeling was Kalepo was ahead of Buelow, but we’ve been hearing rumblings that Buelow had a better spring than Nate, both were tried inside and outside and both did good jobs at tackle and guard auditions.

Also, we’ve been hearing rumblings that Garrison believes Scott could be the steal of the portal class and that he could be an NFL center, but we have not heard if he will be taking snaps at center with Warren or Sanders or McIntyre.

A caveat to that is that Warren, Sanders and McIntyre are also capable of playing either of the guard positions.

The bottom line is that for the first time in a long time, the offensive line coach has options and the options are all very good.

When you can’t distinguish much difference between your top 10 offensive linemen with three starters coming back from an 11-win season, and several of the top candidates are capable of manning more than one position, you are in very good shape.

It will be just one of many developments in August to keep a close eye on.

What’s your prediction on how this shakes out?

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