Welcome back to Hoot State. I dodged wildfires for most of the last week in Colorado. It doesn’t appear like much happened for Owls football while I was gone, except that we’re now free from pretending like New Realm’s beer tastes good. Let’s catch back up on this endless season preview series with a look at our incoming Division 1 transfers in the trenches.
According to data compiled by CBS Sports, Kennesaw State’s offensive line ranks 71st nationally in returning OL snaps, with 39% of reps coming back to defend the CUSA title. First team All-CUSA picks Brandon Best and Josiah Chenault hit the portal, ending up at ECU and Sam Houston respectively. Second-team selection JT Pennington also finished up his college career, leaving the Owls with an interior rebuild bookended by two returners at tackle - JaDarious Lee and Nikola Milovac.
To cope with the losses, KSU added Mateo Guevara (MTSU), Luke Duska (Elon), Precious Ekeh (Central Connecticut State), and Darius Neals (Tennessee State) from the portal, replacing the outgoing transfers with more than 4,700 snaps of Division 1 experience. JUCO guard Mike Wallace Jr. also joined the program, plus four three-star high school recruits.
What’s needed from KSU’s four D1 transfers on the OL this season? Hitting on two reliable starters feels like the baseline requirement from this group when factoring in the two returners at tackle. Anything short of four experienced D1 starters would mean the Owls would have to find nearly 2,000 snaps from players who've never seen serious reps at the Division 1 level. That’s possible, but KSU built the ‘26 OL room in a way where this D1 transfer class is almost entirely load-bearing.
Along with the above big-picture breakdown, I also put together an updated version of last year’s chart that combines subjective PFF grades with a few stylistic points like RPO rate, tempo, and gap scheme rate to account for what KSU likes to do on offense. This post only touches on the Owls linemen with D1 experience and subsequent data points, so a guy like Wallace, who’s definitely in the mix at guard, will be absent - as will all the in-house prospects yet to break through. Evaluating OL transfers based on context-free PFF grades from G6/FCS games seems a little like ranking actors based on Rotten Tomato scores or first-weekend box office numbers. We are all trying our best, though.
