What is your grade for this recruiting class?

FremontTroll said:

Mad_Son said:

My basic view is we "over-achieved" at every position except OL, DL, and QB. I mean, outstanding is the expectation but if we ever achieved the national championship caliber athletes at every position goal that is really an A+ in my mind. OL is close to desirable obviously Sarrell leaving the state was a disappointment but doesn't effect the quality of the group we did sign. DL is a knock down, not because of losing the Nansen Boy but because Gaye alone is not enough. We needed one more. QB is also a big shortcoming, so each of those is a knock down. It was basically either a B+ or an A- in my eyes but just really the great quality across the board really made me lean A-. If we used the University of Wisconsin rating system of A, AB, B, BC, etc then AB is the clear choice and it looks like 71% of respondents thus far agree.

This is basically where I am at. Losing Marlon like that was an emotional blow but overall we landed an amazing percentage of our "Plan A" targets and the two positions of weakness are two positions in which the current roster is pretty set (QB and DT.) We missed on a lot of OL guys but when your plan C guy is a UCLA commit with offers from more than half the conference that isn't the worst position to be in.

Look at it another way- how many guys did we pursue with mutual interest and not land?

CB- ?
S- IPM, Ah You
ILB-?
DE/OLB- DJ
DT- Marlon, Tufele
OL- Foster, AVT, Umana, Davis, Jackson, Ford.
WR- ?
TE- ?
RB- Connor
QB- A bunch. Seemed like we were offering someone new every week for awhile there.

I am probably missing some but clearly it is a short list. Especially considering how high we were aiming.

You can pretty clearly see that our deficiencies are at QB and OL. We got our pockets picked at DT.

The issue is that we have a bizarre policy where we stop recruiting kids that we think are good if we get a commitment at a position. I don't get it.

You can always tell a kid you don't have room for him at the end (or you can do like Bama and try to get one of the best players in high school to gray shirt), but you can't easily replace kids that decommit.

In the end this class was 3 players away from being a complete dream come true: Fozzy, Marlon and IPM. If you switch Burmeister for Haener then we literally have one of the most elite classes I've ever seen.

So we were right on the cusp of greatness. This next year is kind of a down year in the West outside of Utah, so we shall see how things go, but at least we are not going to completely fail at QB this year.

If we can somehow manage to get 3 good OL (Jaramillo, Marco Brewer, Justin Dedich and Steven Jones seem like reasonable targets), we are almost assured of a great class.

haie said:

We have the #1 ranked strength and conditioning coach. That's what I care about. This conference can suck our fat cocks while we have Socha.

I know most on this bored know and love socha, but this can't be stated enough. Our strength staff is light years ahead of the rest of the conference. And it's why we are in such a great position to continue to build and get even better.