Georgia football officially has a new offensive line coach, and some Dawg fans aren’t sure about the hire. Head coach Kirby Smart hired Stacy Searels, who has been coaching the offensive line at North Carolina the last few years.
Questions of whether or not Searels can recruit and keep the Dawgs’ offensive line at an elite level have littered the interwebs, and fans have begun questioning Smart’s decisions again.
Didn’t Georgia just win a national championship? Yes, and it only took a little under two months since hoisting the College Football Playoff Championship trophy for the fans to start complaining again.
While Searels may not have been Georgia’s first choice for this position, he is a great offensive line coach with ample experience and quite a few All-Americans on his resume.
He was one of the first coaches we discussed would make a solid hire after Luke announced that he was stepping down because he knows his stuff.
Georgia football made a great offensive line coaching hire by bringing Stacy Searels back to Athens.
Searels coached at Georgia before during the Mark Richt regime as he was the offensive line coach in Athens from 2007 to 2010. He came to Georgia from LSU after winning a national championship with Nick Saban in 2003. After his time in Athens, Searels left for Texas to coach with Mack Brown, where he coached there from 2011-13.
When Brown left the Longhorns, Searels took the same job at Virginia Tech for a season before rejoining Richt in Miami. He stayed with the Hurricanes from 2016-18 and then reunited with Brown to coach at North Carolina in 2019.
While the Tarheels’ offensive line performance has been up and down since Searels took over, it doesn’t mean he is a terrible coach. Searels is the furthest thing from a bad coach. It isn’t easy to coach the offensive line position, even though some of these fans act like it is.
There is a lot more that goes into developing these guys than blocking. Smart wanted an experienced coach, and he got one in Searels.
The fan base will quickly realize that the Dawgs made a great choice hiring this veteran offensive line coach.
Here are three reasons Searels will turn out to be an excellent hire for the Dawgs and their offensive line future.