... it makes me wonder, is it possible to have great players and *not* have fraud or fake classes? Could you have Bama's roster without academic fraud? Is it even possible?
The true point of this is since GT has no fake classes or even "athlete friendly" majors, we might be at a more severe disadvantage than we even believed.
I think we have always known we operate with an inherently smaller recruiting pool than other schools. Always has been. Always will be.
However, there are more than enough true student-athletes that we can field a competitive team as long as we get our fair share of these true student-athletes. This requires innovation, hard work, and a wide net cast by our recruiters. This is what we are doing right now, and what we have not always done in the past.
The two most common errors we have made in the past are:
a) believing we have to focus our recruiting in a small geographic area
b) believing we should surrender the truly gifted athletes with high academic potential to the factories without a fight
We have to be ready to go where ever there are potential Tech Men, whether that is Georgia, Pennsylvania, Europe, or Bismark North Dakota. Anywhere. The successful schools with high academic standards recruit nationally. We have to as well. Otherwise we limit ourselves to a pool of quality athletes that is just too small to fully stock a modern team.
Once we identify our potential targets, we cannot be afraid to pursue them. We do that by building a culture that make great players want to come here, and know they have to work academically as well as physically to reach their full potential. These top athletes, if they are going to be successful at the P5 level, are not going to be afraid of work. They just want to get satisfaction during the process.
It is the losers afraid to crack a book.
