In retrospective rankings, 3 of Chan Gailey's classes were ranked pretty high.
Also, as I pointed out in that recruiting thread, you have to take the early recruiting rankings with a grain of salt. Back then recruiting services weren't staffed like they were today. Gailey had a bunch of 2 stars because services probably never got around to ranking them and left them at the default 2 stars.
I’d say that the early and middle recruiting classes were legitimately weaker. His first class, he spent forever at the Dolphins and he just wasn’t here recruiting. Then, while he hired good recruiters on staff, he still didn’t seem to think it was his job too. He also ignored academic progress, because he thought it was someone else’s job, and the NCAA imposed recruiting limitations. All of those things limited our recruiting classes, and they were because of decisions he made.
He also didn’t balance his classes well. Part of that was the restrictions, but you watched games on offense and wondered who was going to block; I remember thinking that we got really thin on OL (but better towards the end of his run).
In his last few seasons, after all of that, he finally got it and started recruiting and promoting the school like he should have all along.
Fans were already fed up, which is a shame because if he had started more like he finished, he could have been a good coach.
There were still problems—he never got a good OC or realized that you might want to score more than 30 points sometimes (even though they occasionally did). Others can list more.
It’s weird—I think Gailey is simultaneously proof we can recruit much better than we do, and also that overall he didn’t recruit better than CPJ, all wrapped up in one package.
I think the next coach could get us up in the better classes in the conference. Even Wiz should be able to get the right people to support him.
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