Why recruiting gurus don’t get the portal

It’s harder for Fetters to rank portal guys because he only gets hard for teen bois.

Yes. That's the joke.gif

Word. The other thing that gets overlooked is that every system presents opportunities to express different skills.

Consider, when it was 100% TBS, then it was X% recruiting and Y% development. Washington fans love this idea now because it reminds them of Don James and because of recency bias with Petersen. But it's not a given that Washington will always have coaches who are good developers; Washington has had coaches, may currently have a coach, and may in the future have coaches who aren't great at development. Sark? Fisch? Lake? Others?

Now, the game is different. Now, it's X% recruiting, Y% portal, Z% integration and XX% development. Integration is important. Is your system so fucking complicated that you need either a PhD in football or more than a season under your belt to completely internalize the playbook so that it's second nature? There used to be an almost rule of thumb in the Pac 10 … teams with senior QBs did well, and teams with underclassmen QBs did not. The role was so critical and it took a while for a kid to develop a mastery of the playbook, develop an ability to make reads and deal with the speed of the game. The senior guys tended to be better. There's no time for that now. So, a program will be relatively more successful if when they get their guys in there they can assimilate them quickly, because there is no fucking time. Are you just generally good at bringing in new people and getting them integrated quickly? Or are you slow at that? If the latter, you're going to struggle.

It's just going to reward a slightly different bundle of skills. The same thing happens in the workplace. What Jimmy was good at before all of a sudden doesn't fucking matter anymore. Jimmy better get good at something else real fast.

Adapt or die. Some of my favorite Huskie QBs of all time would struggle to be recruited today. We? - the old we? - used to come here and extole the virtues of a system that puts the QB under center and insisted as axiomatic that kids who played in a spread instead of a pro set could not play in the NFL. Then when that went out the window, we said yeah, but kids who play exclusively in the shotgun can't play in the NFL. Then when it became clear they could, we said RPO kids can't play in the NFL. Then running QBs. It's always something. The game just changes. Everything does. This is the new game. You don't get 4 years. You have limited clean slates. You have to have a system that works in the current system.