recruiting numbers

mortaqui

mortaqui

Varsity Lurker
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Apr 2, 2009
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I'm trying to wrap my head around our 12 scholarship number for the upcoming class. Why is it so low, considering how small our classes have been in recent years?

2005, 19
2006, 16
2007, 20
2008, 20
2009, 21
96 total

In general, GT has a terrible attrition rate over the years. Academics runs alot of guys off. This is further compounded by the guys who left when Coach Johnson signed on last year (Colin Peek, James Johnson, Taylor Bennett, and more recently Greg Smith come to mind). So why is our total for next year so low? Have we not lost as many guys to attrition as we normally do? Have more walk ons been awarded scholarships than I realize? Did we have an abnormal amount of guys transfer in? Anyone know the answer to this?

for reference,

Alabama's number of recruits signed over the same period:
2005, 32
2006, 23
2007, 25
2008, 32
2009, 27
139 total

I realize Bama is oversigning, but come on, thats not even in the same ball park as us, and our upcoming class is gonna be 12?

Georgia's total is 112.
 
We have signed low numbers the past 4-5 years because we were on probabtion. When you sign low numbers there is less attririon because there is less competition for playing time.

FWIW, we do not have a lot of attrition due to academics either. "The Hill" does not allow the AA to recruit players that are not qualified for Tech. In fact, I would bet we have one of the lowest ratios of players that are ineligible due to grades. Lewis Clinch is the only one from a "money sport" that I can't think of since flungate in '03.
 
I spoke with my uncle at length about this earlier today. He played at tech in the 60's and there were an abnormal amount of guys lost every year to academics. I played at tech in the 90's and my best guess without looking is maybe 40% of my class graduated. There were very few guys who failed out, they just transfered b/c they couldn't hack it academically, but trust me when I say our attrition rate has been high over the years. We don't over sign like most schools, b/c there is no way a guy who cant qualify to get in, will possibly be able to hack it. Still, we lose a fair amount of guys to academics every year.

We were on probation from 2005 - 2008, limiting our total number of scholarship athletes to 79. The brunt of that was reducing our class size by 6 in 2005 and 2006. (we signed 19 and 16 players respectively). So the question is, if we're off probation, and signed so few players from 2005 - 2008, why is our 2010 class so small?
 
Our class is small this year b/c we are nearly full on our scholarship limit. from what I understand
 
Also remember that we don't sign guys who aren't qualified. The Bama's and UGA's of the world will sign guys that they know won't qualify, but want the "star" bump and to get in good with the guy when he does qualify.
Every year there are 4 and 5* guys who get signed and go to Hargrave or a junior college. Tech never even offers guys like this, so when we sign 20, we get 20.
This trend is what pisses me off when ranking recruiting classes. If 5 three/four stars never report and go to a junior college, does team X still have a top 10 recruiting class? Further, when they resign again in 2 years, won't UGA or whoever get credit for the same guy twice?
 
GTBandit22 said:
Also remember that we don't sign guys who aren't qualified. The Bama's and UGA's of the world will sign guys that they know won't qualify, but want the "star" bump and to get in good with the guy when he does qualify.
Every year there are 4 and 5* guys who get signed and go to Hargrave or a junior college. Tech never even offers guys like this, so when we sign 20, we get 20.
This trend is what pisses me off when ranking recruiting classes. If 5 three/four stars never report and go to a junior college, does team X still have a top 10 recruiting class? Further, when they resign again in 2 years, won't UGA or whoever get credit for the same guy twice?
Click to expand...

I understand, please dont focus on that part of the post. Its comparing apples and oranges, I get it. I'm just asking what's eating up our numbers this year if we've signed so few guys lately. Have fewer guys left for some reason, than years past? Did the academic oversight overhaul that came with probation actually work, and reign in the number of guys we've lost? I've seen low number classes like this over the years, but its usually following an abnormally large class or two, and thats not the case with us.
 
I stand corrected. After much research on RR.com, I have found the answer. There has been a lot of attrition from the '05 and '06 recruiting classes. 12, to be exact, is the number of scholarship kids from those 2 classes that should be seniors this year. About half left during the Johnson era for various reason. The '07, '08, and '09 classes picked up those 12 extra schollies. So instead of graduating 18 guys this year and having a normal 20+ class, we are only graduating 6 this year and thus only able to sign ~12.
 
JWE37 said:
I stand corrected. After much research on RR.com, I have found the answer. There has been a lot of attrition from the '05 and '06 recruiting classes. 12, to be exact, is the number of scholarship kids from those 2 classes that should be seniors this year. About half left during the Johnson era for various reason. The '07, '08, and '09 classes picked up those 12 extra schollies. So instead of graduating 18 guys this year and having a normal 20+ class, we are only graduating 6 this year and thus only able to sign ~12.
Click to expand...

That sounds about right to me for normal GT attrition. The thing is, we didn't sign and abnormal amount of players the last 2 years to make up for it. 20 and 21. You can sign up to 25 for a single class in any given year. We were well below the mark allowed in both cases. Seems to me, 20 is about the right number on any normal year. Figure, 20 per year would be 100 in 5 years, with 15 spots for attrition (which sounds really low to me over 5 years) to get you down to the allowable 85 on the roster.

I'm also trying to find the stat, but I read somewhere we only had 79 (?) guys on scholarship this past year...lowest in the ACC.

Does anyone know where to find a definitive list of scholar-shipped players for the last 5 years? Seeing our totals broken down per year may answer this.
 
That's a great point. I've defnitely been scratching my head about that, since we should have 20+ guys signed in each class. The variance can only come from walkons and transfers. So the question is, how many walkons have scholarships in each class?
 
If every player stayed their full four years and most redshirted, you divide 85 by 5 and you get 17. We are awful young plus have had several walk ons to get scholarships and a couple transfer in. I still think we will sign close to 16-17 players next February. I feel that 2-3 will go pro, a few will give it up or transfer, (and I hope not) one or two will get injured.
 
mortaqui said:
we didn't sign and abnormal amount of players the last 2 years to make up for it. 20 and 21. You can sign up to 25 for a single class in any given year. We were well below the mark allowed in both cases. Seems to me, 20 is about the right number on any normal year. Figure, 20 per year would be 100 in 5 years, with 15 spots for attrition (which sounds really low to me over 5 years) to get you down to the allowable 85 on the roster.
Click to expand...

Dude....where have you been? We were on probabtion for 3 years which limited us by 9/10? scholarships.
 
It's been my understanding that Coach Johnson has been pretty tough on the walk-ons. It goes without saying that he's trying to build a program where each player is fighting for his spot.

I wish I knew more about our scholarship situation as well. For those curious as to how it generally will break down and what we will probably push towards scholarship wise: http://www.mililanibuckeye.net/class_breakdown_by_position.php

I would love to see a chart like this for Tech and if I have enough time I can try to put something together, but I don't have a website to support it.
 
First off, any school can only have 85 scholarship athletes at any given time during the year. That is the maximum limit. So talking about Alabama's large classes is a moot point. Most of those kids don't even make it on campus. Ours on the other hand typically do manage to make it to campus.

We only have 12 because its fairly simple, we only have 12 scholarship athletes GRADUATING next year. So hence we can only replace the 12, no more. More than likely the reason why we have so few graduating is because the seniors before this one, probably played a lot as freshman and weren't redshirted into this class of seniors. On top of that there were probably guys in this class who were redshirted so therefore are only juniors.

Got it?
 
BarrelORum said:
First off, any school can only have 85 scholarship athletes at any given time during the year. That is the maximum limit. So talking about Alabama's large classes is a moot point. Most of those kids don't even make it on campus. Ours on the other hand typically do manage to make it to campus.

We only have 12 because its fairly simple, we only have 12 scholarship athletes GRADUATING next year. So hence we can only replace the 12, no more. More than likely the reason why we have so few graduating is because the seniors before this one, probably played a lot as freshman and weren't redshirted into this class of seniors. On top of that there were probably guys in this class who were redshirted so therefore are only juniors.

Got it?
Click to expand...
We actually only have 6 graduating players. Five are seniors while one is a junior. We're taking twelve because we have 79 on scholarship right now, leaving another six spots open.

With attrition and people leaving early, the number will probably go up a few more.
 
BarrelORum said:
First off, any school can only have 85 scholarship athletes at any given time during the year. That is the maximum limit. So talking about Alabama's large classes is a moot point. Most of those kids don't even make it on campus. Ours on the other hand typically do manage to make it to campus.

We only have 12 because its fairly simple, we only have 12 scholarship athletes GRADUATING next year. So hence we can only replace the 12, no more. More than likely the reason why we have so few graduating is because the seniors before this one, probably played a lot as freshman and weren't redshirted into this class of seniors. On top of that there were probably guys in this class who were redshirted so therefore are only juniors.

Got it?
Click to expand...

As best I can tell, we only have 8 scholar shipped seniors graduating looking over ESPN and Rivals from 2005-2006 vs our roster.

Correct me if any of this is wrong, and forgive my Bushwick numbers, as this doesnt take into account any walkon's who earned scholarships, but just from ESPN/Rivals signees for 2005-2009, vs our Roster for next year, (including scholarships for the transfers I could easily identify, Allen & Cox), GT currently has 78 scholarship players for next year. Figure Coach Johnson will probably fill that out with a few walkons. We are only losing 8 scholar-shipped seniors for next year, which will leave us with 15 spots minus any walk-ons or transfers.

As best I can tell, we only lost 3 from the 2007 class, Donley, Threet, and Yandell, and 4 from the 2006 class Marius, Evans, Ingram, and Bray. We did however lose to transfer or graduation 10 from the 2005 class. Tucker, Smith, Peek, Miller, Garner, Dunmon, Cox, Clark, Braman, and Blackwood.

Looks to me that other than 2005 (although all those guys may have graduated for all I know), the attrition at Tech hasnt been that bad. Way off from my class of 2000. I wonder if that is a reflection of the academic oversight the AA put in place post probation? That would be great news if so.

I cant get over the fact Bama and their consecutive No. 1 recruiting classes "signed" 43 more players than us over that period.
 
mortaqui said:
As best I can tell, we only lost 3 from the 2007 class, Donley, Threet, and Yandell, and 4 from the 2006 class Marius, Evans, Ingram, and Bray. .
Click to expand...

Yandell is still listed on the roster and I have not heard anything about him leaving.
 
I do not understand what is so difficult about understanding scholarships in football...yet it is the most asked question on the boards.

- You can never have more than 85 on scholarship at a time.
- You cannot put on scholarship more than 25 players during one class....you can sign letters of intent...but that just starts the process prior to academic admission, physicals, etc.
- January enrollees can count toward the previous class or the class coming in later that year in the fall.
- Scholarships are one year renewables...GT has never taken one away that I can remember.

This years situation:
- We have 81 on scholarship now including Chris Jackson. This is 4 short of the max.
- We have 6 scholarship seniors this year (Voss, Howard, Sellers, Griffin, Hill, and Frierson). This creates 6 more openings for next fall as their eligibility runs out in the spring.
- Zach Krish, a reshirt junior on scholarship, has already indicated that he will depart the program upon graduation this June. This creates 1 more opening.
- As of today.... 4 open spots + 6 graduating seniors + 1 player leaving eaerly = 11 open spots to come in fall of 2010.
- There will certainly be attrition over the next 12 months either due to academics, injury, transfer, NFL, etc...this is why the coaches may take 12 or 13 commitments (one or two over the current openings) knowing that something will clear up before fall of 2010.

You really do not want to be at 85 max because you want to have room to reward walk-on's and take transfers...always keeping one or two open. However, we are willing to carry 85 next year to try and get some balance back to the recruiting class as this years is small...and next years is 21 at minimum.

Going back to the original post...yes we have signed 96 players over 5 years....but we have also awarded 8 additional scholarships through walk-on's and transfers. (Allen, Egbuniwe, Jackson, Blair, Krish, Bedford, Cox, Edwards). That is 104 scholarships in 5 years and we have 81 now....that is negative 23.
 
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