How does Texas' potential 2025 O-line compare against other national title contenders?

Eric Nahlin recently posted another one of his roster audits focused on the offensive line, a position of great change for the Longhorns between 2024 and 2025.

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Texas fans have talked a lot about the offensive line heading into 2025, and it has become a major concern for a lot of readers and those around the college football world. After all, the Longhorns are losing four starters, and three from that group at least two seasons in Austin. But Eric closed his article with this remark: “Fortunately, this position group is not as big of a rebuild as people assume. I’ll expand my thinking on that in the next day or two.”

I took to the IT Members Only board in that post and said this:

“Here’s something I will say in favor of this current line grouping. Texas’ starting five is only returning one starter, but this line will return two players with more than 1,000 snaps and three players who were top five recruits at their position or better. DJ Campbell was the No. 1 guard and has played 1,800 snaps, Cole Hutson 1,300. Brandon Baker was as close to a five-star as humanly possible without being one, and Neto Umeozulu was a high four-star. The only person who doesn’t fit into either category is Trevor Goosby, who most people are extremely high on in Texas circles.”

I went on to compare this to other top teams in the 2025 national title race, to which my boss claimed I stole his article idea that he was planning on producing. So obviously I had to dive deeper into this idea and expand on my thoughts, bringing as unbiased of a look as possible in comparing national title favorites offensive lines.

Here’s my methodology: I wanted to compare Texas with the other four teams that are the faraway favorites for the national title: Ohio State, Georgia, Oregon and Penn State. Teams like Notre Dame, Alabama and Michigan are still on the outside looking in with uncertainty at quarterback, and schools like Clemson and Tennessee don’t have the talent composition and trench stability to force themselves into the groups of favorites.

So in comparing these five schools, I am scrutinizing every team’s projected starting line within three categories: experience, natural talent and past production. These are the kinds of things that NFL draft evaluators look at when deciding on any position, and the perfect combination of the three leads to an NFL starter.

I quantified these stats with three things: career snaps, recruiting OR transfer rating and last season’s PFF grade (minimum 200 snaps). Each stat was separated into five different tiers and assigned points. The blue tier (as shown below) was worth five points, while the red tier was worth 1.

I looked at the projected starting five offensive linemen for those five schools and graded each of their players on a 3-15 scale. For reference, Kelvin Banks would’ve entered 2024 with a rating of 13 but leaves the school with a perfect 15 rating. Here’s how the Longhorns graded out:

As you can see Texas returns just one starter and is expected to enter 2025 with two players that didn’t reach 100 snaps in 2024 on their offensive line. For Baker, Umeozulu and the rest of the incoming starters who didn’t play much in 2024, I simply gave the N/A spot an orange grade.

Some key takeaways from the Texas side of things: Campbell is in for a monster year if he can put everything together. Goosby may be one of the most underrated players in college football, as my confidence in him is closer to a 10 than it is a 7. And Baker’s natural talent should make him a serviceable offensive tackle.

But this whole idea stemmed from comparison, so how do they look compared to the rest of the pack?

Frankly, I was surprised by these results compared to when I initially entered this exercise. Oregon is relying on three transfers, and Penn State is returning four starters and replacing their sole loss with an elite prospect. My original assumption would be those two teams would be flipped.

But Oregon’s offensive line rebuild has been an impressive one. The tackle combo of Isaiah World and Alex Harkey could be the best in the nation, but I’m also not 100% sold on that. The experience and transfer ratings are there, but I don’t have full confidence that their on-field production will be the same jumping from G5 to Big 10 play.

I am buying Georgia’s hype and Ohio State’s lack thereof, however. Georgia returns four guys that played significant time last season, not using a single transfer. They have the highest average recruiting grade of all five lines with Texas a close second. These two teams have a similar philosophy, not using the transfer portal and banking on recruits that average out at a roughly 94 rating. For Ohio State, they will be losing four starters, and I’m very suspect of the right side of the line with Minnesota transfer right tackle Phillip Daniels.

These five teams are generally very similar in terms of how I view their offensive line talent for the upcoming season. I think Oregon may be a little overrated, and Texas and PSU underrated. More than anything, these five teams can be grouped into some philosophical buckets that tell a lot about how they will try to succeed at the position in the future.

Texas and Georgia are recruiters through and through. These two return less than 4,000 combined snaps, while the other three schools all have 5,000+. On the flip side, these schools have the most naturally talented group. Their win conditions come from athletic high schoolers finding their potential.

On the other side of the coin, Penn State and Oregon are fully committed to the veterans in their groups. Penn State won the offseason in terms of returns, similar to how OSU did in ’24. Four returning starters combine for over 5,300 snaps. Oregon stuck with what they’ve done in seasons prior and hit the portal heavily, acquiring gems like Harky and World. These two groups are very volatile, however. Penn State’s line wasn’t that great last year, and Oregon is expecting a lot from career G5 players. If they can exercise the veteran savvy to control games and allow for Oregon’s quarterback friendly playbook or Penn State’s electric run game to shine, they will do extremely well.

OSU finds themselves in a weird medium point where they recruit well, but have lost so much that I’m not sure how much stock we can put into this year’s group. Rice’s Ethan Onianwa was a huge transfer win at LT, but I really don’t trust this group in 2025. I think it will be the worst of the five contenders, especially if a redshirt freshman in Julian Sayin is directing traffic at the line of scrimmage.

Overall, Texas’ offensive line is not a Joe Moore Award favorite the way that it was expected to be coming into 2024. That group would’ve graded out closer to 53-54 points even with Cam Williams entering as a four-star with under 150 career snaps. The nice part of the methodologies that Georgia and Texas utilize is their groups have the potential to carry games and be a strength of a champion, but right now we can’t get too ahead of ourselves. Texas’ offensive line should be good in 2025, even with four starters leaving, I’m just not sure it’s going to be a top five in the nation.

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I’ll be continuing this style of researching with other groups of these five teams, most likely focusing on the skill position talent next.