Today's #DailyDose question: Among returning coaching staffs, who do you consider the best assistant coach hire of this past off season?
In the interest of narrowing the pool of candidates, we took coordinators off of the board and focused just on position coaches.
Scott's choice: Georgia running backs coach Thomas Brown
With 2014 receivers coach Tony Ball now at LSU, Mark Richt's move to hire Thomas Brown away from Wisconsin and move Bryan McClendon to wide receivers was an upgrade for Georgia. This gave the Bulldogs two alums coaching the positions they played as Bulldogs, which is especially important after hiring an outsider in Bryan Schottenheimer as offensive coordinator. Georgia can let Schottenheimer handle the X's and O's while Brown and McClendon hound the state of Georgia for its top athletes. Having two young coaches on staff be able to tell current and future players, "I played here, I lived this," is invaluable and a definite improvement of Richt's coaching staff.
Doug's choice: LSU defensive line coach Ed Orgeron
In my opinion, no existing coaching staff hit a bigger home run this off season than Les Miles and his staff at LSU with the hire of Ed Orgeron.
To be quite honest, after what Coach O did at USC in some very adverse conditions, I'm surprised he wasn't picked up to lead a program somewhere. With that said, I believe that everything happens for a reason, and Orgeron is a great fit in Baton Rouge for a variety of reasons.
First of all, Orgeron will have a wealth of talented defensive lineman to work with, at a place with as rich of a recent history with defensive lineman as any other program in the country (see tweet below). That's always a great combinaton. Couple that with the fact that you'd be hard pressed to find a better recruiter and overall fit at LSU than Coach O, who joins a LSU staff that is already stocked with outstanding recruiters (including one of the best in the country in running backs coach Frank Wilson), and you've got yourself a force to be reckoned with.
Zach's choice: Texas A&M offensive line coach Dave Christensen
I swear I'm not saying this just because I talked to Jake Spavital this week, but adding a former FBS head coach and a guy who's been an offensive coordinator in two separate Power Five conferences as an offensive line coach is just unfair. If Christensen can de-kink the Aggies' running game and - to be clear, Christensen's job came with a run game coordinator title, but Spavital will still run the show there - move their yards per carry from a 47th-ranked 4.63 to somewhere in the top 25 and, well, they may not even need John Chavis’ improved defense.