There has been some pessimism regarding this unit's prospects for 2023 so I wanted to offer some perspective.

Not counting Avery Henry or any potential transfers, we will have 16 scholarship players for the OL in 2023.  This is pretty good depth for those who recall the Tressel years where it seemed we struggled to recruit and have 12-14 at most with walk-ons in the 2 deep at times.

Out of those, at least 12 had an offer from either Alabama, Michigan or Notre Dame, 3 programs with pretty good track records for OL talent.  The recruiting hasn't been nearly as bad as some have made out just because we didn't grab every 5 star out there.

In 2013 after narrowly missing a Natty with X-Brax leading the way, we had a huge exodus of OL talent (Jack Mewhort, Andrew Norwell, Corey Linsley and Marcus Hall).  The lone returner was Taylor Decker ( a recruit just inside/outside the top 150 depending on the recruiting service ) .

In 2014 we had to convert a Defensive Lineman, Daryl Baldwin to play the other tackle.   The interior was handled by 2 recruits outside the top 500 (Pat Eflein and Jacoby Boren) and a top 200 DL recruit, Billy Price.  

The rest, you can say is history.  Not saying past performance indicates the future , but I would say the situation going into 2014 was much more challenging than we have it now.  But just because we don't know now who other the studs will be at OL, there's a pretty good chance they're already on the roster. 

I would still try to pluck a couple from the portal for depth, but that's another luxury we didn't have in 2014.

'