Different people have different measuring sticks for a rebuild. A rebuild to being competitive with our rivals and in the division hunt shouldn't take 5 years. Winning the SEC could take considerably longer than 5 years. We're not rebuilding in a vacuum. Other schools are reloading while we're rebuilding.
We have underachieved at times and are behind what we hoped, but good player development and a great recruiting class could get us back on track. We'd better be leapfrogging Mizzou, UK and SCAR and competing with UF and UGA before Year 5, though. If we're not, we're either not recruiting or developing players at a high enough level to get us where we need to be.
i think it's also important to consider where you're rebuilding from. we're a 3rd tier SEC program right now......we're not only not competing with the traditional rivals, we're losing to the middle too. so that is another hurdle...where we view ourselves and where we are, don't always line up.
agree wtih the recruiting and development. and short of that mega class that could inject an instant impact of sorts, i think this is a "recruit the core, and build around it" type rebuild at this point. that takes time. as long as 1/3 or better of the class is blue chip, we'll get there.
and you can only sign so many players, players can leave a lot easier now than they used to could, (which is a good thing for the ones the new coach maybe wants to go, and a bad thing for the ones the new coach would like to keep) and you have two signing days to prepare for....calendar is sped up big time vs. how it used to be, so you have to be able to close the sale w/out necessarily being able to show off your product. bottom line, today more than ever, you're asked to put the cart before the horse....win, then you'll get good players, when it used to be, get good players, then you'll win.
In theory, that should have been the expectation in Year 3. Because this year has been so bad, people may back off of it, and maybe rightfully so.
By year three you should have 70 or so of your own players. If you are good at identifying and developing talent, 8 wins is a reasonable expectation here.
every sitatuation is different interms of record, but yeah, i think in general by the end of year 3, you probably have a good idea of what track you're on....i mean year 3 for us, is probalby gonna include 4 top 7 programs in the first 6 or 7 weeks...........we're not near that level yet, so hard to say "win 8 or else".....we could be A LOT better next year and still finish 7-5.
I posted this before but Stuart Mandel used this line of thinking to reinforce his point that maybe hiring a Saban disciple - and trying to build exactly like Alabama and Georgia - might ultimately limit how much talent we can gather.
The theory is why would a top level guy sign up for our rebuild when the exact finished product is already available to him?
there's some evidence to support that, especially since the new recruiting rules and playoff have come about. who really has burst on the scene from a national perspective in the last few years? i mean no one comes outta no where anymore on a national level.
it's literlly the same programs every year. it's far easier to fall from the top than it is to jump up to it, a la FSU.
i mean think about it....Clemson and Bama have had a lock on 2 of the play off spots and their conf titles for a while now.
OSU kinda the same thing in the big10 though they've not made the play off every year.
then you have OU, LSU, UGA, a Pac 12 team (Wash, Stanford, Ore etc....whoever the flavor the year is over there)....ND every now then....that have made the play off or are at least in the conversation for a good portion of the year.
and that's it.
sure, programs can have "a season", but even then what does that get them, none of them have been been able to sustain, much less match some of that previous success.....Oregon, Auburn, Mich State, Wash, Stanford, TX, Michigan, Florida, FSU....
none of them.
maybe i'm just jaded as a TN fan and having that kind of success seems so unrealistic anymore, but i think in today's college football world, espcially if your in the SEC and playing 3 top 10 programs, at least, every year, 8-4/9-3 really doesn't suck......and it's freaking hard to do...a helluva lot harder to do now than it was 15 years ago.....
the gaps are closer today than they've ever been in the "middle". so just trying to get to the point where you're at the top of the 2nd tier is much harder today. the TV revenue that's shared, the bowl revenue that's shared, has enhanced EVERYONE's product to the point where there just aren't that many real advantages of going to one school or the other, unless you're UGA, Bama, Clemson, OSU, LSU, OU etc....there's about 6-8 programs that have that advantage. then about another 30 that are all about the same......and so on and so on.....
anywho....all that to say, these are also some other reasons i think programs like TX, NE, TN, UCLA, USC etc...aren't just "getting back to how it used to be" as fast as some THINK they should.....
tl;dr version...be patient.....you really don't have a choice.
