The purpose in upgrading facilities is to improve recruiting. And make no mistake facilities are a factor in recruiting and the improvements there are much needed. The problem for me is I don't believe Johnson is the coach to take advantage of the improved facilities as I believe his offense is a much larger obstacle to overcome than the current state of our facilities. I don't think we will see much of a bump in recruiting despite the fundraising efforts of Stansbury and that is my problem. I actually think the case for keeping Johnson is stronger if the fundraising efforts weren't taking place.
I agree that the best reason to consider bringing in a new coach is excitement/momentum. Not much a coach can do in year 11 to build excitement except win. But I disagree that the offense is the problem for recruiting.
How do you measure "recruiting"? If you're talking Star rankings; a conventional offense might raise our rating marginally with the right coach. But, only because the rankings are
not a rating of a players' athletic ability. They are a rating of how desired the player is by "top programs".
The folks writing for 247 are not going out and evaluating players. If they were actually good at doing that, they be working at Bama making 10x more money. The top programs do evaluate talent, so the rankings are a proxy for specific abilities they're looking for. But the rankings have limited utility when looking at players that don't fit the prevailing system. In an alternate universe, where the factories ran the 3O and Tech ran an air raid. JeT would have been a high 5* and Trevor Lawrence would have been a 3/4* athlete recruited as a WR. There's overlap, but our 'prototype' at each position is different from Bama's under the current offense.
If you evaluate recruiting on the results. Tech's offensive recruiting has been really good under CPJ. Our offense ratings total offense, SP+, FEI, whatever you want to look at have been consistently well above our recruiting rank. Defense less so, and that's a fair knock on the head coach. But the mob is talking about changing the offense not the defense. I just don't buy the argument that the offense hurts defensive recruiting. If you believe that we'll have to agree to disagree.
I haven't seen a real example of any
coach really moving the needle on recruiting at any school. The schools that rise and fall in the rankings it's
money, facilities, branding, (and we find out later cheating), not the head coach.
James Franklin got a lot of press for being a "great recruiter" at Vandy. The 4 years before he got to Vandy their average class ranking was 66, he elevated it to 43, after he left it's been ~50. They never really won anything, even when the SEC-E was way down.
So, maybe, if we got a coach whose best skill was recruiting, we could move up 10-15 spots on average, with the occasional better class. Have us around 35th in recruiting, that's still never going to be enough to out-talent Clemson, UGA and Miami... Right now we're recruiting around 50th rank. Our Offense is consistently top 25 (often better), the defense has been lower than 75. Let say a great recruiter comes in to run a pro-style offense and raises our recruiting ranking to 35th. A offense and defense performing on par with recruiting isn't going to be a top 25 team.
IMHO, we have to do something different than the competition if we want to win. Based on his podcast, T-Stan agrees.
