Yeah, I found the article interesting particularly because it addressed the potential for development of football players in the limited time window of 4 years. What can you get done in that span of time given what you have to work with at the beginning. I think guys who already possess speed and/or power are probably some of the critical factors that we may be using in our recruiting with this new staff. Apparently it's no big deal to add size and strength in the limited time window but speed isn't going to improve all that much. Of course guys will play faster and perhaps more in line with their top speeds as they better learned what to do and become more comfortable in their assignments but their 40 times when they get to college is apparently unlikely to improve all that much. The article suggested in the first 2 years you can get some limited power gains with skill position players but for linemen any power gains are going to be negligible. I went back and looked at some of the 247 evaluations of the linemen we signed in this most recent class and the key word power sort of jumps out at you.
We all want immediate impact players in our recruiting classes but the competition for those guys is increasingly fierce. We could be star chasers and possibly recruit some guys the public services have rated higher than some of the guys we end up signing but I think our staff may be looking for those things you can't teach in the time available to us so when you add what we can teach we potentially end up with high impact players. I think that's probably part of the explanation why 3 star teams like Vandy, Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia, etc. have been having some success against our perceived more talented roster. They've recruited players who have some intangibles and things you can't teach and then they've added size and strength and developed them so that after 2-3 years they are often able to offset our talent advantage on paper.
And when you think about it, it sort of helps to explain why we would sign a guy like Kenneth George Jr. I mean the guy at the time I don't even think had any rating by any of the public services but something about the kid may have convinced our staff that the kid wasn't afraid to hit anybody and already had a pretty powerful punch. jmo.