ATHENS — CBS color analyst Aaron Taylor, who will call Saturday’s game between No. 2 Georgia and No. 12 Missouri, made a special request to UGA ahead of his visit to the Bulldogs’ practice facility this week.
“When we got assigned this game, the first thing I did was send an email to (UGA associate athletic director/sports communications chief) Claude Felton saying, ‘Hey, Claude, could you ask your equipment guys if they can give me a helmet? If I come to practice or show up on the sideline, I’m afraid people are going to be throwing stuff at me,’” said Taylor, who arrived in Atlanta late Wednesday night. “Claude said, ‘Yeah, you’re probably going to need one. I’ll see what I can do.’”
Why would a CBS broadcaster – particularly one who’s 6-foot-4, 300 pounds – need protection at a Georgia football facility? Well, because the Bulldogs have a bone to pick with Taylor and his Joe Moore Award.
OK, it’s not really Taylor’s award, but the former Notre Dame and NFL offensive lineman generally is credited for the creation of the Moore Award in 2015. A two-time All-American and Lombardi Award winner himself, Taylor thought there needed to be an position-group honor representative of what it is to play on the offensive line. That is, a trophy that rewards the whole unit.
Perhaps there is no other position group in football that must function better as a unit than the offensive line to be successful. Requiring physical contact on every play, O-linemen rarely avoid injury through an entire season. Therefore, frequent alternations and reconfigurations are commonplace.
Case in point: Georgia’s offensive line this season.
The Bulldogs lost 6-foot-7, 340-pound preseason All-American tackle Amarius Mims to an ankle injury in the third game of the season. The solution for UGA offensive line coach Stacy Searels was to move 6-7, 320-pound senior Xavier Truss from left guard to Mims’ right-tackle spot. Meanwhile, sophomore Dylan Fairchild was inserted into the vacancy at left guard and – viola! – five games later, the Bulldogs remain undefeated (8-0, 5-0 SEC) and rank fourth in the nation in total offense (506.5 ypg) and passing offense (334.2) and third in third-down conversion rate (56.3%).
Of course, it hasn’t been quite that automatic. Truss has had to come out of games because of injuries and was replaced alternately by sophomore Austin Blaske and freshman Monroe Freeling. Fairchild, banged up at times or just losing some of the battles, has alternated regularly with sophomore Micah Morris. Even Georgia’s seemingly indestructible senior center Sedrick Van Pan has had to come out of games. He was relieved by sophomore Jared Wilson.
Such mix-matching is not uncommon throughout football. The level that Georgia’s offense has been able to perform amid all the changes is. The Bulldogs have allowed only five sacks of quarterback Carson Beck and a total of six. That ranks No. 6 in FBS.
“I see what everybody else is seeing, which is as the year has gone along, Georgia’s doing what Georgia does and that’s control the line of scrimmage,” Taylor said Thursday. “Stacy Searels is doing one heck of a job with that unit, especially given the pieces that they’ve had to change around. And it’s likely to get better when Mims can get back into the rotation.”
Of course, all these things could be said of the Bulldogs’ offensive line the past two seasons. Offensive-line performance played a major role in Georgia going 29-1 and winning both the 2021 and 2022 College Football Playoff championships. Yet, it was Michigan’s offensive line – not the Bulldogs’ – that received the Moore Award and currently displays its considerable trophy in its campus trophy.
And this is not your standard, everyday trophy. The Moore Award, designed by famed sculptor Jerry McKenna, features the likenesses of five linemen in active poses. Fittingly for the athletes it represents, the trophy is six feet high and weighs more than 800 pounds.
“We joke that it’s a sarcophagus, and Joe Moore is actually buried inside of it,” said Taylor, who played for the legendary line coach at Notre Dame. “If it takes five to win it, so it should take five to lift it, right?”
Well, Georgia wouldn’t know because its linemen haven’t had the opportunity to lift it. And that is a notable point of contention inside the walls of their team meeting room deep inside the Butts-Mehre football complex. Outside that space, the Bulldogs don’t openly begrudge Taylor and the selection committee for favoring the Wolverines’ unit.
In 2021, they let their play on the field do their talking in a 34-11 CFP semifinals victory over Michigan in the Orange Bowl. Last year, they mostly scoffed again when the Wolverines landed the award again. Presented before the playoffs begin, Georgia’s line helped their way to a 15-0 season and a second consecutive national championship. Taylor said Michigan won it by two votes.
But Van Pran, the unit’s captain, handled the slight with deference while asked about – ad nauseum – at SEC Football Media Days in Nashville, Tennessee in July.
“I have a lot of respect for the guys on that committee because I know it’s hard,” Van Pran said. “Michigan was a really, really good offensive line last year. They rushed for a lot of yards, had a really dynamic back and didn’t get messed up too much in the passing game. So, to be honest, that’s a hard decision, and I don’t envy them.”
Said Mims in the preseason: “We expect to be very special.”
Behind the scenes, though, Taylor and the Joe Moore committee heard from the Bulldogs.
“Oh, yeah,” Taylor said. “As we saw, Georgia’s physicality traveled much better than Michigan’s technically sound fundamentals, if you will. So, yeah, they were very vocal in their displeasure. There’re some signs up in the O-line meeting room, as I understand it. They exchanged some pleasantries with us. I understand the frustration. The fan base had us off Twitter for a couple of weeks with some of the discord.
“I say that tongue-in-cheek. What stands out is we’ve created something that the offensive-line community cares about. At the end of the day as a voting body, which includes 133 line coaches, we’re just a bunch of fat kids picking our favorite flavor of ice cream.”
Georgia’s offensive line already has made the first cut, which was to make the Joe Moore’s midseason honor roll. The next step is to be included as a semifinalist.
Of course, winning tends to enhance a line’s chances. The Bulldogs will be looking to do that for the 26th consecutive time against Missouri on Saturday. As always, Taylor thinks it will come down to the play in the trenches.
“I know there are tremendous quarterbacks and the skill players, but this is still the SEC, and it’s a blocking and tackling league, a line-of-scrimmage league,” said Taylor, who won a Super Bowl with the Green Bay Packers. “So how these lines protect their quarterbacks, how these lines perform on third-and-short, how they create room for backs to run, is going to be critical.”
Not surprisingly, Taylor gives the Bulldogs the edge in that area. And whether Georgia wins the award this season, there will be offensive lines and fan bases somewhere else that will be outraged their team didn’t get it.
To Taylor, it’s worth all the grief he gets about it.
“It’s among the best things I’ve ever done in my life, including my wife and children and playing for Notre Dame,” he said. “I’m so proud of what we’ve created. It’s a lot of work. There’s no stat sheets to look at or highlights to watch. You have to grind through tape. But we wanted to find a way to recognize the essence of what this game is made of, and that’s toughness and teamwork.”
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