Not a judgment on our current staff. The program needed to be stabilized before we could hope to recruit at a championship level (although the early losses probably set us back at least a year).
I sincerely don't think so and things that have happened since have helped. Not only did team performance improve significantly... you saw guys with the wrong mindset.... leave. If I'm UT's coaches, I'm selling playing time and that building a winning culture is so important that removing guys with the wrong attitude was key to improvement. I don't necessarily want to criticize a particular player but there was some addition by subtraction this season. UT lost some physical talent.... and got better.
Ultimately, you're going to need to recruit a ton of 4 and 5 stars to have a realistic shot at competing in the playoff. You're going to also need great coaching, but the talent needs to be elite.
I had a recent long running conversation with someone about this. It is unlikely you will see a program that consistently recruits outside the top 25 getting close to the playoff. OTOH, there is an idea that you have to consistently recruit "top 5" to do it. This year's 4 disproves that theory. tOSU has... Clemson and OU haven't. LSU is kind of mixed. I think the worst class represented in this playoff was a #19. But no one on Clemson's roster was a member of a top 5 class.
I say that to say this... if Pruitt is getting 4/5* players who are actually worthy of their ranking and don't bust... and he is finding 3* players that are underrated then UT even while not finishing in the "top 5" may be building the talent to compete sooner rather than later.
One of the interesting things he does is look for players who are very flexible. There are long arguments about where Holiday will end up. The good news is that he has the size and athleticism to be good at several positions. I think the Beckwith kid from AL is someone who could be a star at several positions who was hurt because he played a position in HS he cannot play in college. Spraggins and Robinson on the OL are 3*. I will be surprised if one or both aren't stars at UT. Perry is a 3* that now weighs around 300 lbs but who at some point played WR for his HS team. Once they find his position (I'm kind of hoping for a 270 lb athletic TE)... he has a chance to be much better than that 3* ranking.
I'm not predicting anything here. But these are really good athletes who under different circumstances could have been 4/5* recruits. IMHO, if Holiday had been a WR or RB on a better team... he's a 4 or maybe even 5* player. That kind of speed doesn't usually get ignored.
Michigan St. is the potential outlier that comes to mind (without digging through the past playoffs), and I think they got smoked by Bama.
If I were looking at someone else in the Big 10 it would be Penn State or maybe Michigan. The rest are just too slow when it comes to combined team speed.
Baylor would have made an interesting outlier. I personally think Utah would have gotten scorched by any of the 4 who made it in. The Pac12 has become inexplicably weak. There are more 4/5* players within about an hour of LA than anywhere else in the country.
My contention would be that you probably have to be in the top 20.... but the recruiting sites are not accurate enough to distinguish between a roster that averaged 4th and one that averaged 12th.
