Okay so serious non trolling question here....
There was some negative reaction from fans when the last two guys committed, based on their "rankings."
This of course led to a number of guys bashing the guys being negative, and basically suggesting that rankings/stars don't matter.
My question is... if rankings/stars don't matter and every kid we take is good in your opinion because the staff likes them, etc.... why do you even really follow recruiting? Maybe that isn't the right way to ask the question. But the point I'm trying to make is that most of us have careers/families/etc. We're not full time scouts. Neither are you.
As such, generally speaking the first thing probably 99% of any of us look at when we offer a kid, or a kid commits, or visits, etc, is their recruiting profile and their ranking.
Are rankings the end all be all? Of course not. There are exceptions to the rule. But by and large, the best teams in college football are the ones who have the best recruiting classes. And those recruiting classes are based on rankings. Clemson, Alabama, UGA, Oklahoma, OSU, etc....
Now, I get calling out the people who insult or trash a kid based off of .85XX composite. The staff can identify talent and if the kid didn't have some, then the staff wouldn't accept the commitment or likely even offer. But I don't get the snarky holier than though attitude towards those of us who question a commitment. Because if everyone is being honest, even the stars don't matter crowd, if they had their choice of Rakim Jarrett committing yesterday over Calloway, they'd go with Rakim. Or Marshawn Lloyd over Ebony Jackson, they'd choose Lloyd. Et cetera et cetera et cetera....
TLdnr: My birthday was this past Friday. I celebrated the 44th anniversary of my 19th birthday so I am getting really old. Old people seem to talk a lot and never shut up. I've known that my whole life and now that I'm older and getting even older, I'm enjoying being on this side of that situation.
Anyway, as I was saying......
I think what some people may not want to admit is that we may in some cases end up having to take recruits at various positions that are way down the list on our board simply because the guys farther up the board are for whatever reason more attracted to opportunity offered elsewhere. I think I read recently that we’ve offered over 300 recruits in this class. I pull up a list of prospects we’ve offered for a particular position and see top ranked talent dominating the upper portion of each list. I actually think we’re offering more top ranked talent with Pruitt than we ever did with Dooley or Jones. The latter two may have basically thought a lot of that was just a waste of time.
I think it’s hard to recruit almost anywhere unless you’re having a decent measure of success on the field and consistently putting guys into the league. Pruitt & Co. would not be telling highly sought after recruits if they commit we have a shot at having the No. 1 recruiting class if ratings/rankings didn’t matter. In the beginning Pruitt said we’re going to worry about the guys we get not the ones we don’t get. Every coach is going to point to the class rankings when his class is near the top and say the rankings don’t matter when it’s, shall we say, disappointing relative to our competition.
Fulmer said on Saturday that we probably needed a couple more recruiting classes to affect a turnaround in our football program. Nobody wants to hear that. Most people are tired of waiting for next year let alone two more years.
I think there are probably a host of reasons that make it difficult to recruit to Tennessee in the current environment, chief among them is that we haven’t been all that relevant in quite some time. I think we’re doing remarkably well considering our circumstances, or at least we did last year. We actually ended up with 15 blue chips, including the two transfers. We won a handful of battles for highly prized guys.
One of the other things that I think maybe is a challenge for us in recruiting is our lack of stability with coaches. I look around the league and wonder of all the coaches in the SEC which would be the most likely to bolt from their current school for greener pastures. There’s not many but at the top of the list is probably Jeremy Pruitt if he ever has any success here, or at least I think that would be the perception of most outsiders. Mullen ain’t leaving Florida, Smart isn’t going anywhere. Fisher is locked in. Most of the other guys might actually have a hard time even getting an interview elsewhere. Mark Stoops, maybe, but I think he’s got it made at Kentucky. They don’t have the same expectation level that we have and I think that gives him an advantage there.
I think it is noticeable that Pruitt has been presenting himself more in recent weeks as embracing all things Tennessee. I don’t know if it’s going to work but it definitely addresses a vulnerability in my view.
I hate it with a passion unlike any other but I think our rebuild is going to take more time than many of us, especially me, are comfortable with. We need to at least get back to playing to our talent level. In order to do that we need to fill in some holes. I think this staff has already done a lot of that but we’ve got a ways to go. We have to have at least solid players in every position group in order for our talent advantage, where it exists, to show.
Finally, there’s a lot of disappointment right now with some people regarding our program. It didn’t just start this past weekend. It’s been around for more than a decade. We are universally described as a passionate fan base. I have never in my life heard us described as a patient fan base. Patient fan bases do exist in places like Missouri, Kentucky, Vanderbilt, Mississippi State, etc., but not on Rocky Top. I expect us to win 9 or 10 games this year, or maybe 6. I’ll be much more positive if we win 9 or 10 than if we only eek out 6 or 7, but even 6 or 7 is at least moving in the right direction, maybe.
From a recruiting aspect, if enough of those top rated/ranked guys eventually decide, for whatever reason, to jump on board with us this year, I’m reasonably confident that we’ll make room for them, even at the expense of some of the lower ranked guys who are hoping and praying with all their might that that doesn’t happen. I mean I love those guys and I love their passion for wanting to be at Tennessee but in the end this is a tough, hard-nosed, business.
So far in the recruit threads where we have some people bemoaning the caliber of the player that just committed I’ve tended to stay on the positive side with my comments but make no mistake about it, I honestly only endorse taking recruits that have a composite rating of 0.9500 or higher. For everything else, I’ll keep trying to bite my tongue, which really really hurts.