LegendaryGT
Dodd-Like
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2009
- Messages
- 62,557
But we play Duke every year too, losing 3 of the last 4 (badly) to them and their staff size is smaller than ours.
Georgia and Clemson both lose people to Alabama's smaller-sized staff on an annual basis.
Recruiting staff size is just another excuse. Hill restrictions and the scheme combine to make it difficult for a 20-man staff to get 4* and up talent in here.
You seem to be saying here that because recruiting staff doesn't explain the entire performance difference between us and every other team that it's not a factor at all.
But that's not true. It's not as though Alabama could keep stealing people from Georgia and Clemson without any people recruiting at all. Saban built his multi-million dollar lake house on recruiting. Investment in the activity does clearly make a difference, and right now we aren't even as invested in it as Vanderbilt. Yes, there are other factors, like you say, but changing the scheme and dropping the grade requirements down to tard levels isn't going to get us 4* and up talent here on the regular in a vacuum either, because there are a zillion pieces to the puzzle of doing that. Recruiting staff size absolutely is one of them.
And having addressed that, you should take a look at a different column of that spreadsheet. Total number of staff is another indicator of what we can accomplish in recruiting compared to others than the number of purely recruiting focused staff. We're dead last in the ACC there, with 19 (Duke has 30!), and indeed, dead last in the P5, and Georgia is more than double us. We're actually behind most teams in the G5, and we're tied with Army. Now, the recruiting focused staff do a lot of the leg work in identifying guys and coordinating and, hell, probably even flying around and recruiting, but every coach on every staff in college football recruits. When the other guys have double your manpower and only have to fill the same number of slots, you get what you've got. When you've got a staff the size of the very smallest schools in the game, you get exactly what you've got.
The truth of the matter is, we're behind in pretty much every way that counts. You can single out every single factor as an excuse, but that just makes you disconnected from reality. The reality is we've got problems, real problems, in recruiting that have nothing to do with who is coach or what kind of ball we're playing.