Like Rick, you have never understood how Paul recruited for the O. A short tutorial:
Look at our D recruiting under him. Pretty good, especially over the last 5 years. Plenty of 4 and high 3 star players. So why was the O recruiting different?
The easy answer - it was because of the offense we ran - is, in fact, the correct one. The O demanded a different type of player then most schools were after and we recruited to fit the positions and their requirements. Paul would have liked to get a lot of 4 and 5 star types and he offered. But he really wanted the diamonds in the rough and the players others overlooked because they didn't fit with shotgun spreads. A good example = Connor Hansen. Hansen was a low 3 star OL; he had one other P5 offer from UCF. He came to camp at Tech and was offered halfway through the first day. Why? Because he fit; a 6'2", 325 lb. guy who loves to hit people. It's as if he had been born to drive block. Did Paul care that he wasn't a 4 star? Why, no, he did not. He was what the O needed at guard or center. And getting someone like him handed to us was a - wait for it - recruiting bump.
If you look up and down our present offensive lineup you'll see plenty of people like that. That doesn't mean they aren't good football players; you can hear from our new staff about that. It's that they didn't fit the profile for a 4 star shotgun spread player coming out of high school and they weren't offered by teams that ran a shotgun as a consequence. And we got low overall recruiting rankings as a result.
Now, I'm sure you knew all of this without me having to tell you. You simply don't like the consequences of thinking like Paul did. Well, now we'll have to recruit better and probably a lot better. We are now competing with everyone else and playing like everyone else. I hope we can see a real recruiting bump soon and that it lasts over years because, brother, we are really going to need it. And, as I keep saying, I think Coach can deliver it, if he is given the time and the infrastructure he needs.
lol. Paul Johnson would have taken any 4* or 5* player, they just had 0 interest in playing here for the most part on the offensive side of the ball. Recruiting for scheme is absolutely important, but so is recruiting realistically. Especially after Chip Kelly made it to the NFL, then the other tacky offense became a pro style offense. Recruting is difficult to look at in the past, due to the rise of internet culture in the past 10 years or so, especially with the advent of facebook. Rivals and 247 were each bought for 9 figure deals, and with that money comes more infrastructure, analysis, camps, and whatnot that can provide different amounts of exposure and data than what other coaches had, so looking at past coaches is kind of a null point with how much it has changed.
At the end of the day, CPJ won the division outright twice, the confrence once, and then found a backdoor to the ACC title game a third time when both UNC and miami had to back out due to potential sanctions, giving GT the edge in a tie breaker they otherwise would have lost. No one can and should take that away. However, in Paul Johnsons tenure, some important things happened relative to GTs schedule.
Virginia Tech broke their 10 year 10 win streak, and absolutely fell off a cliff
Miami was on sanctions, rather real or self imposed, for all but the last two years. Now on their 4th coach in 12 years
UNC was under scrutiny for one of the biggest potential academic scandals in NCAA history, and no one knew what was going to come of the programs.
UGA fell off a cliff, relative to where they were at in 2007. Gailey's worst UGA team he played finished 23rd. 6/6 ranked. CPJ had 6/11, which is the lowest percent since the 70s. Last coach to play 5 unranked teams since Dodd. Only one to go winless at home vs multiple unranked uga teams.
Clemson did get better, but it was 3/6 ranked, just like Gailey, for the first 6 years. 5/5 to finish.
In short, there was a huge opportunity gap that arose during the beginning/middle of the tenure of Johnson, and the team to step up and take the coastal crown: absolutely no one. Split evenly across 6 different teams. Fact is, most people aren't too satisfied about that, as GT would seem like the obvious candidate to take over the throne.
So why did we not step up? Really the two big reasons are split between the coaches we both had, when honestly both are correct.
On one hand, we had two not-so-great-while-they-were-here ADs that had GT fall behind in the arms race that is college football. We are under budget, under facilitized, and under staffed relative to everyone else. With the correlation of spending and success in college football, a potential scheme to give an advantadge would be necceasry until GT comes back to at least the middle of the pack. We dont have to be at the top of the ACC, just the coastal.
on the other hand, recruits do value the facilities, but winning and team culture also are a huge driving factors. Atlanta has become the center of the SE for culture, especially in pop culture. Having an old school offense and coaching style isn't wrong, but it doesn't take advandtage of what the off campus offers that GT can provide. As stated above, the changes in recruiting services also makes people wonder if in a post-chip kelly world if having a different offense would allow GT to make up the tiny difference in talent gap that the coastal division has. There isn't a huge correlation for recruiting ranking and end of season ranking, but the one for recuritng ranking and division placement is pretty damn high.
At the end of the day, both play out to be true. But only time will tell which argument ends up being stronger. Anyone not thankfull for CPJ is lieing out of their ***, but to think that the game of football has changed needs to take a step back and really look at the changes.
As for the actual topic of the thread, Feel like we should get a better view of the offense in two weeks or so in the spring game, but until we actually see it in action, this will be nothing but a debate thread as there is nothing tangible to talk about due to the unique situation we are in.
