Gah! I am sick and tired of this train of admission excuses. Oh, Bluto, our school is so haaaard!
We can recruit our share of smart athletes. We just need to know what we are doing. We have done it before and we will do it again.
We are getting a sports management degree, and we can sell that to athletes with half a brain.
Pepper Rodgers cleaned up in recruiting, particularly one year (76?) when he got state players of the year all throughout the south. Bobby Ross got enough athletes to beat everyone in '90. Chan Gailey, who many of you stupidly revile, cracked the recruiting code there near the end. We won an ACC championship with those kids.
Three different coaches. Three different eras. Three different tales of recruiting success. All in the post-integration era, which is all that matters.
Smart athletes are good athletes. Saw a study of NBA backgrounds. You would think from the hype the league is full of hard cases rising out of the ghettoes. Wrong. They are statistically significantly more likely to come from middle and upper middle class backgrounds.
In college football the worst of the hard cases are also weeded out and never achive, at least proportionally. With only 85 ships available, you hit more success stories on the solid citizens and good students.
One of CPJ's worst mistakes when he started here was listening to idiot fans, many of them are active here, who egged him into a high focus on Georgia athletes. So he gave up hard-earned pipelines to quality school leagues in Illinois and the northeast and elsewhere to sign a bunch of Plan C Georgians. At least he is figuring out this blunder and trying to reopen those doors now.
You can argue scheme and its affects on recruiting, but if you pretend it is manageable on offense and negligible on defense, you are fooling yourself. We are not getting top athletes here in any quantity if we run 80% of the time. This last game has to be a template for the future or we will continue to slide slowly backwards. NFL is a pitch and catch league. Big Boy college football is a pitch and catch league. Athletes want to play pitch and catch. So we better pitch a few and catch a few. I am sure CPJ promises this a lot when he goes into homes, but this last game is the first time he really converted theory to practice.
I think I know the pros and cons of our spread formation offense as well as most here, so I don't care what you think of the offense when it is on the field. We are only talking effects on recruiting right now, and those effects are all negative to us.