@Animal02, I read this board a lot. I haven’t seen anyone on this board say that recruiting is the be all to end all. I haven’t run into anyone saying that in passing outside of this board.
I have seen a number of people happy that there’s more of an emphasis on recruiting.
X’s and O’s were enough to get us there, but they weren’t enough for us to win.
In 2008, we used our schematic advantage (and tremendous effort by our players) to make it to the Chick Fil A/Peach Bowl. We got out-athleted by LSU. In 2009, we made it to the ACC Championship, where Clemson edged us based on recruiting. We went to the Orange Bowl, where Iowa out-athleted us again. In 2011, we lost to Utah for pretty much the same reason.
There are some times where we had a middling season, like 2010, and played in a bowl game that wasn’t great. We won against USC in 2012, but it was obvious that they didn’t even want to be there.
We’ve had a couple of wins in there—Mississippi State and Kentucky. Kentucky has improved as a team largely because of their recruiting and they’re headed in the right direction.
We were getting outplayed by teams that were out-recruiting us. They were coaching and training and conditioning their players, but they were also out-recruiting us.
For the last four years, X’s and O’s weren’t even enough to get us there. We qualified for bowls 2 out of the last four seasons, and the trend was downward. Our last bowl was the QuickLane bowl in Detroit. We got massively out-athleted by Minnesota. In Paul Johnson’s swan song, where his players might have gone all out to send him off with a win.
It’s clear we need to take a step up in recruiting to be able to compete. That, and defensive and special teams coaching have been our obvious shortcomings. And still coach and train our players while recruiting better. Spending time on recruiting doesn’t mean that you don’t care about the other parts of building a team. I haven’t seen anyone say that it does, either.
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