Tate Ratledge ranked among ten best returning interior linemen
Pro Football Focus continued its rundown of the top returning players in College Football for 2023 on Monday, and as was the case with wide receiver and tight end, Georgia has one listed at interior offensive line. According to Max Chadwick of PFF, Georgia guard Tate Ratledge is the seventh best player on the interior – guards and centers.
“Ratledge did a masterful job protecting quarterback Stetson Bennett during Georgia’s national championship run this season,” Chadwick wrote. “His 85.6 pass-blocking grade on true pass sets ranked second among all guards in the country. The redshirt sophomore also only allowed a pressure on 1.4% of his pass-blocking snaps, the third-lowest rate for Power Five guards.”
Ratledge started 14 of 15 games for Georgia at right guard. He missed the Kentucky game due to injury, the only one that he did not play in all year. This came just one season after Ratledge had emerged as the starter in the same spot ahead of the 2021 season and manned the position for the opener against Clemson before suffering a season-ending broken foot on the first drive.
“Tate has been great,” Georgia head coach Kirby Smart said of Ratledge before the season as he continued to make his way back from the 2021 injury. “He’s worked really hard at his conditioning. Ron (Courson) feels like he’s in a position where what we did in summer training would have been tougher on him coming off the injury than actual football practice. So the football practice piece should relieve some of that. Now, the strain and effort to push off and double teams, as we put on pads, may increase that. But he’s in a good spot. He’s been rotating in with the first group and the second group. I do think there is a matter of coming back where you haven’t, you know, passed off or twist, you haven’t passed off a stunt. There’s some quick back guys inside that he’s going to take some reps to get that back. But certainly feel good about where he is and his toughness.”
“I’m feeling great,” Ratledge told media members. “It’s been a process getting back of course, but the more I work at it the better I feel. It’s been a pretty good fall just getting back into it … A lot of joy. First day of practice, I had the biggest smile on my face I’ve ever had in my life. It was just great to be back out there and get back to it. The first big step was how it happened, sitting on a bull rush. I think one day I got bull rushed and instinctively just stuck it back there. After that, it was like, ‘Okay, I can do this now.’”
Ratledge returns as a part of a Georgia offensive line that allowed just nine sacks all season, the first to do so during a 15-game run. Center Sedrick Van Pran and left guard Xavier Truss are both also back on the interior. Georgia will have to replace each of its starting tackles, but Amarius Mims is more than capable of manning one of the spots. He started in the College Football Playoffs in place of a banged up Warren McClendon and is expected to start in 2023, giving Georgia four offensive linemen returning with some sort of starting experience.
