[charlie22]

Connor Smith is still currently a senior at Ohio State, where he starts at Guard. He's started since last season, and was rated on Rivals as a 4 star offensive lineman coming out of HS.

Thanks for the info. Sounds like he's doing well. I watched him just totally destroy his down lineman assignment and then get down field and block a cornerback when Colerain played Highlands in 05. And it didn't just do it once, he did it multiple times. Since then we've played against some pretty hyped big O linemen that did okay when their team was running the ball right behind them, but were really poor at run blocking when the ball went elsewhere and in their pass blocking because they were so slow. They may have been fast/quick for their size, but they were still slow.

I hate to say something bad about a kid that is no longer alive, but Highlands D line and LBers ate up Kyle James of Cincy St X last year. He was one of the highest recruited O linemen in the country. Was 6'7", 290 pounds and I'm sure would have developed into a really good college O lineman. But the simple fact was that he didn't have the foot speed and quickness to block smaller high school D linemen and LBers, and thus wasn't very effective. And a lot of the other kids on X's O line last year were also very, very big. I think I remember a stat from the TV coverage of that game that X's O line averaged 260 pounds and Highlands D line averaged 190 pounds. But X simply could not run the ball on Highlands last year because Highlands was so much faster and quicker than X's O line.