You might mean one of the other boards. Here’s the first post on this board from 2013:
Thread 'Your first subject'
https://gtswarm.com/threads/your-first-subject.1/
We were definitely all about recruiting in 2013, because that was Eric’s passion. But the board was started well after Collins went to Alabama.
Giff Smith stayed here until 2010, when he went to the Buffalo Bills, and still had a reputation as a recruiting ace. Glenn Spencer is up at Wake as their LB coach, and he also had a sterling reputation as a recruiter.
This is just my personal opinion from ages back, but I think that Gailey hadn’t figured out how to run a program and run recruiting until the last half of his tenure, and by then he was trying to overcome “Flunkgate”. I also feel like he didn’t set his goals high enough until it was too late. However, by the end he’d put together a great recruiting staff.
Collins was a piece of that staff. One of the posters said that Collins was good with social media in 2006-7. Twitter had just been launched and Facebook just added photos. Instagram didn’t exist until 2010. The hot phones of 2006 were the Blackberry and the Motorola Razr. Sidekick phones were still really popular. The iPhone launched June of 2007, after the signing day. Data plans were really expensive. I think we were probably seeing more text messaging than anything. Unless one of the players wants to talk about how some social media played a part, I’m gonna doubt that theory.
We’d also had three years of people seeing Calvin Johnson on the flats, and that probably helped make us cool to high school players.
Back to the class. My best guess is that it was both a team effort and lightning in a bottle. A couple of the players decided that they’d come to Tech together and pulled in more players they new. Collins helped. We had good relationships with the high schools by then. I’m trying to remember all Gailey’s coaches, but he had a LB coach that was great. I think Collins was an ingredient in the successful recipe, but he wasn’t the only one, and we kept recruiting well after he left.
What percentage impact do you tie to Collins in 2006-7? Was he 5% responsible for the class? 10%? 30%?
(I don’t think he was 30% of what pulled players to Tech—that seems too high to me).