Recruiting strategy, not the star system, is the issue.

RLR

Jolly Good Fellow
Messages
355
Sons of the Confederacy extend a hale and hearty invitation. The South will be back. Next time don't be so reluctant to share your views.

Thank you, brother. But I'll politely decline the invitation and save you the awkward moment when you discover I'm indian (dot not feather). Not my views, just saying how I feel man.

Cut away the sarcasm from my message and you'll realize I'm basically saying ATL1's point. Although - I think GT did a pretty good job with the OVs. Definitely agree there needs to be improvement. . . that's not negative.

"BTW , I'm NO DAMN Confederate and never will be, so miss me on all the Yankee eff NYC talk. If the kid got the smarts, can play, and has interest in GT, get him. I don't give a damn if he's from Timbuktu." << Anyone who doesn't hate people generally or New Yorkers specifically didn't go to law school. In all seriousness, I want to emphasize that comment was a bad humored way of saying we shouldn't, IMO, divert limited recruiting funds away from GA, Fla, AL, SC, TN to attract players in the northeast.
 

Squints

Helluva Engineer
Messages
1,254
PA and NJ might be slightly better. But have you ever met anyone from PA or NJ? They move down south & won't shut up about how superior their landfill state is. The east coast folk are educational snobs. I don't really buy into this mystique that they think GT is so awesome. They're too busy inflating the prestige of Penn, MIT, Harvard, Yale, all the ivys, all the liberal schools that you've never heard of that charge 80k tuition a year, all the private religious schools. GT is a public school. Carpet baggers find public schooling less appalling than gluten. Especially a public school in the stupid, hillybilly south. At least go to Vandy or Duke if you go slumming, said them there guidos.

As someone born and raised in NJ you can kiss my *** you inbred redneck hick. You lost the war. Get over it. :D
EDIT: Ahahahaha I read it the same way @Skeptic did. My bad. I was just busting your chops.

Seriously though, your perception of how education is perceived is way off. Georgia Tech has a great reputation up here and there are a lot of quality public schools. Please try not to stereotype an entire region based on the attitudes of an obnoxiously wealthy minority. And I wouldn't sleep on the football talent in NJ at least. We usually put out a few quality players each year. I don't follow it extensively but think we've had two of last four #1 overall prospects.
 
Last edited:

Buzz776g

Jolly Good Fellow
Messages
466
From August 2015

Map shows the states with the best college football recruiting situations

AEKxBnY.0.png

As someone born and raised in NJ you can kiss my *** you inbred redneck hick. You lost the war. Get over it. :D
EDIT: Ahahahaha I read it the same way @Skeptic did. My bad. I was just busting your chops.

Seriously though, your perception of how education is perceived is way off. Georgia Tech has a great reputation up here and there are a lot of quality public schools. Please try not to stereotype an entire region based on the attitudes of an obnoxiously wealthy minority. And I wouldn't sleep on the football talent in NJ at least. We usually put out a few quality players each year. I don't follow it extensively but think we've had two of last four #1 overall prospects.
Cuse's heat map supports your NJ point.
 

croberts

Ramblin' Wreck
Messages
866
Hey, our baseball team is mostly from Georgia and outperforms football most years ....... Baseball Pre-Season Practice ....... and recruits the best in the state since we win more than anyone else in the state.

As for basketball, ................... irrelevant.
Well you can thank the hope scholarship for that huge advantage. 11.8 scholarships for fully funded program. If you are a ga kid and want to go out of state, you get a 1\2 scholarship, in state you can get 1/2 and the hope with out out of state expenses as well.
 

Boomergump

Helluva Engineer
Featured Member
Messages
3,262
Though the star system of today didn’t exist, GT did bring in some highly regard recruiting classes under Ross and O’Leary.

Besides being good coaches, a major reason that Ross and O’Leary were effective at GT is that they each cast a wide recruiting net. I remembered there being a number of players from the Northeast on the Ross/O’Leary teams. I appreciated that GT was a national school and our teams reflected a national presence.

Take a look at the 1990 roster.

http://grfx.cstv.com/photos/schools...90--9/misc_non_event/1990-football-roster.pdf

The 1990 team roster shows:
15 players from Florida,
11 players from NY
6 players from PA
4 players from MD
3 players from OH
2 players from NJ
5 players from SC,
5 players from TN
4 players from NC
3 Players from AL,
1 Player from LA
1 player from AZ
1 player from VA
in total 59 of 132 players listed were from out of state, near 45% of the team, with 22 being from north of the Mason Dixon line.

It was a mistake for GT to begin concentrating more on the state of Georgia in lieu of the recruiting up and down the east coast, especially given the school's more pronounced name recognition and prestige out side than inside the state. Since the retirement of Homer Rice, it is like a basic concepts -- GT is a science and engineering school, and there are only so many science and engineering football and basketball players in the nation to be had, much less in a single state; so in order to consistently compete in these sports, casting a much wider recruiting net than the neighboring schools is a must -- easily seen from afar become not readily apparent upon entering into the GT athletics department.

Or maybe the concepts are perfectly apparent to all, but as a matter of policy with all things being equal GT now prefers to award sports scholarships to lesser players from in state than to better players from out of state.

Harper, there is a lot to like about this post. As has been stated on here a thousand times (I'm sure people are tired of hearing it) I am not real keen on the star system and don't have much respect for its value. With that said, the importance of getting the right players for our program (academic inclination included) cannot be understated. We can and need to do better. IMHO the best way forward to is to keep our school's identity, with its limited number of majors while taking very few if any exceptions, and cast a wider net. This will take money, lots of it. Maybe we don't have it. I don't have it to give, but if I was a major booster I would give a ton of cash to fund a major recruiting staff increase and travel costs associated with a tripling of our efforts. I understand the south is pretty dense in talent. Great. However, if there is a 6-5", 270#DE with great burst, motor, and a good GPA in Idaho, I want us to meet him and sell him on ACC football and a great education in the city of Atlanta. Let's not sell our soul. Let's lift ourselves up. Recruiting Georgia is great. We should keep doing it. However, we are far less likely to reach our goals being exclusive like that in the recruiting game. In my estimation, we get a lot of good players, but we often end up just a couple of difference makers short every year from reaching the NEXT LEVEL as a program. Idaho may not have nearly the football depth of talent of Florida, but I GUARANTEE you, there are a handful of kids in that state we would be really happy to get if we could.
 

AE 87

Helluva Engineer
Messages
13,016
Harper, there is a lot to like about this post. As has been stated on here a thousand times (I'm sure people are tired of hearing it) I am not real keen on the star system and don't have much respect for its value. With that said, the importance of getting the right players for our program (academic inclination included) cannot be understated. We can and need to do better. IMHO the best way forward to is to keep our school's identity, with its limited number of majors while taking very few if any exceptions, and cast a wider net. This will take money, lots of it. Maybe we don't have it. I don't have it to give, but if I was a major booster I would give a ton of cash to fund a major recruiting staff increase and travel costs associated with a tripling of our efforts. I understand the south is pretty dense in talent. Great. However, if there is a 6-5", 270#DE with great burst, motor, and a good GPA in Idaho, I want us to meet him and sell him on ACC football and a great education in the city of Atlanta. Let's not sell our soul. Let's lift ourselves up. Recruiting Georgia is great. We should keep doing it. However, we are far less likely to reach our goals being exclusive like that in the recruiting game. In my estimation, we get a lot of good players, but we often end up just a couple of difference makers short every year from reaching the NEXT LEVEL as a program. Idaho may not have nearly the football depth of talent of Florida, but I GUARANTEE you, there are a handful of kids in that state we would be really happy to get if we could.

Along the same lines, I think we should look for ways to lower any road blocks for SAs wanting to major in STEM fields.

We should then set up online resources for out of area students to find us. On a whim, I googled "ncaa football engineering," and some Geneva College popped up on the front page. I reckon there are some corn fed Midwesterners who might come south if they saw the options easily. Just a guess.
 

collegeballfan

Helluva Engineer
Messages
1,694
Harper, there is a lot to like about this post. As has been stated on here a thousand times (I'm sure people are tired of hearing it) I am not real keen on the star system and don't have much respect for its value. With that said, the importance of getting the right players for our program (academic inclination included) cannot be understated. We can and need to do better. IMHO the best way forward to is to keep our school's identity, with its limited number of majors while taking very few if any exceptions, and cast a wider net. This will take money, lots of it. Maybe we don't have it. I don't have it to give, but if I was a major booster I would give a ton of cash to fund a major recruiting staff increase and travel costs associated with a tripling of our efforts. I understand the south is pretty dense in talent. Great. However, if there is a 6-5", 270#DE with great burst, motor, and a good GPA in Idaho, I want us to meet him and sell him on ACC football and a great education in the city of Atlanta. Let's not sell our soul. Let's lift ourselves up. Recruiting Georgia is great. We should keep doing it. However, we are far less likely to reach our goals being exclusive like that in the recruiting game. In my estimation, we get a lot of good players, but we often end up just a couple of difference makers short every year from reaching the NEXT LEVEL as a program. Idaho may not have nearly the football depth of talent of Florida, but I GUARANTEE you, there are a handful of kids in that state we would be really happy to get if we could.
Yeah, we tend to forget/ignore the recruiting budget when Johnson arrived, what it is now and how it compares to our competitors.

Roll the money, the entrance academics, the limited majors, the academic grind to succeed all into the mix. It is what it is.
Should we compare the stipend GT pays to the stipend our competitors pay? Is that a factor?
 

dressedcheeseside

Helluva Engineer
Messages
14,070
Harper, there is a lot to like about this post. As has been stated on here a thousand times (I'm sure people are tired of hearing it) I am not real keen on the star system and don't have much respect for its value. With that said, the importance of getting the right players for our program (academic inclination included) cannot be understated. We can and need to do better. IMHO the best way forward to is to keep our school's identity, with its limited number of majors while taking very few if any exceptions, and cast a wider net. This will take money, lots of it. Maybe we don't have it. I don't have it to give, but if I was a major booster I would give a ton of cash to fund a major recruiting staff increase and travel costs associated with a tripling of our efforts. I understand the south is pretty dense in talent. Great. However, if there is a 6-5", 270#DE with great burst, motor, and a good GPA in Idaho, I want us to meet him and sell him on ACC football and a great education in the city of Atlanta. Let's not sell our soul. Let's lift ourselves up. Recruiting Georgia is great. We should keep doing it. However, we are far less likely to reach our goals being exclusive like that in the recruiting game. In my estimation, we get a lot of good players, but we often end up just a couple of difference makers short every year from reaching the NEXT LEVEL as a program. Idaho may not have nearly the football depth of talent of Florida, but I GUARANTEE you, there are a handful of kids in that state we would be really happy to get if we could.
Completely agree on the recruiting budget expansion. If we want to complete at the top tier, we need to have a recruiting budget greater than the surrounding factories who have blue chip players sending their film to them. And when I say greater, I mean double or triple.

The only problem I see is that our coaching staff is limited in number and there's only so many hours in the day for them to spend on the recruiting trail. Also, most relationships with recruits start when they're sophs in hs and require lots of man hours of contact. Not sure how much better we can do by expanding the non-coach recruiting staff but it couldn't hurt. The real trick is identifying the right kids and then hitting them real hard. Maybe the expanded staff could help with that. The last thing we need to do is waste valuable time on kids we have little shot in signing. Target, target, target.
 

OldJacketFan

Helluva Engineer
Messages
8,348
Location
Nashville, TN
Speaking of recruiting budget. Does anyone know what the dollar amount is currently and how it compares to our competitors? If it's been posted before I don't recall seeing it.
 

dressedcheeseside

Helluva Engineer
Messages
14,070
Speaking of recruiting budget. Does anyone know what the dollar amount is currently and how it compares to our competitors? If it's been posted before I don't recall seeing it.
Reported budgets are hard to compare because not all schools include the same things when they report.
 

RedPete

Ramblin' Wreck
Messages
944
Location
Atlanta, GA
Harper, there is a lot to like about this post... With that said, the importance of getting the right players for our program (academic inclination included) cannot be understated. We can and need to do better. IMHO the best way forward to is to keep our school's identity, with its limited number of majors while taking very few if any exceptions, and cast a wider net. This will take money, lots of it. Maybe we don't have it. I don't have it to give, but if I was a major booster I would give a ton of cash to fund a major recruiting staff increase and travel costs associated with a tripling of our efforts. I understand the south is pretty dense in talent. Great. However, if there is a 6-5", 270#DE with great burst, motor, and a good GPA in Idaho, I want us to meet him and sell him on ACC football and a great education in the city of Atlanta... Recruiting Georgia is great. We should keep doing it. However, we are far less likely to reach our goals being exclusive like that in the recruiting game. In my estimation, we get a lot of good players, but we often end up just a couple of difference makers short every year from reaching the NEXT LEVEL as a program. Idaho may not have nearly the football depth of talent of Florida, but I GUARANTEE you, there are a handful of kids in that state we would be really happy to get if we could.

Trouble with recruiting that diamond in the rough kid from Idaho is he might be the only athletic-enough, academic-enough prospect to come out of that school/county in a decade. That's what density is all about. Casting a wider net is great but you also have to concentrate on building relationships and pipelines to schools/areas that produce talent more frequently. Why fly out to Idaho to recruit one kid when you can visit Buford, Parkview. or McEachern right outside Atlanta and talk to multiple prospects and meet several other younger kids who might become offer-worthy down the line?

That's the area where improvement can have the most impact. After we signed Anaji Kerr from McEachern I did some digging and found they've sent upwards of 30 kids to play Div-1 football in the past 8 years and none of them ever go to Georgia Tech. We should OWN the Atlanta suburbs, but Paul Johnson is working on that in many ways, and it'll pay strong dividends down the line.
 

RLR

Jolly Good Fellow
Messages
355
Well, all right then. I guess you see a difference.
Example 1:
Feeling: Combat is the ultimate adrenaline rush; it's exciting
View: War is an evil that should only be used when absolutely necessary
Example 2:
Feeling: To Hell With Georgia
View: all citizens of Georgia should be proud of UGA's academic success & low attendance costs. GT has a duty to elevate UGA, GSU, and other higher education institutions in this state by levering our specialties in technology and process.
Example 3:
Feeling: GT is giving me the shaft. This test was impossibly unfair. There's no way I deserved a 33 on the exam. I'm a failure.
View: "At some point everything is going to go south on you. Everything is going to go south and you’re going to say 'this is it. This is how I end.' Now you can either accept that or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math, you solve one problem. Then you solve the next one, and then the next and if you solve enough problems you get to come home.”
People from the NE
Anyone read the Connecticut newspapers during GE's new HQ shopping period? They (professionally) ripped Atlanta - taking jabs at education, culture, and trying to generalize the entire area from Columbia, South Carolina to Jackson Mississippi as the same backwood slosh. I attempted a reciprocal post, relative to the Conn. newspapers. I'm trying to highlight the South's strengths by dramatically describing the weaknesses of the North and subtlely sprinkling sea salt on recent wounds (ICE buying the NYSE; ATL getting Auto HQs from NJ). The newspaper writers in Conn. don't think that everyone in Atlanta is named Mary Sue and illiterate. Likewise, I don't think people from the NE are the worst.
It's a game to us - it's politics - it's hiphop - it's a form of expression where you communicate in a non-literal sense, paint a picture. Humor, abstract, and non-literal interpretations of things can give us better insights into those things. If the reader missed my intent, it may be because I totally wiffed on this particular writing or because you live in too literal a world. Either way, it's not that big of a deal. After all, this is a sports board. Sports is a soft power institution meant for the masses like you and me to dissipate our nationalistic and passionate feelings in a friendly, competitive manner. That's a good thing! B/c these feelings have been used in many worse ways (See the Klan, 1930s Europe, any other time in human history)
FWIW, I live in a house with four other people - two from the NE, two from the South, & then me, the token brown kid. It's a real melting pot. I probably missed the tone with the OG article b/c joking about new jersey is (1) too easy and (2) so commonplace for me. But again, everyone I know from NJ is good people. I've been there only once & had a great time. . . but that won't stop me from using the "armpit of america" low-hanging fruit in a future sports argument.
 

AE 87

Helluva Engineer
Messages
13,016
Example 1:
Feeling: Combat is the ultimate adrenaline rush; it's exciting
View: War is an evil that should only be used when absolutely necessary
Example 2:
Feeling: To Hell With Georgia
View: all citizens of Georgia should be proud of UGA's academic success & low attendance costs. GT has a duty to elevate UGA, GSU, and other higher education institutions in this state by levering our specialties in technology and process.
Example 3:
Feeling: GT is giving me the shaft. This test was impossibly unfair. There's no way I deserved a 33 on the exam. I'm a failure.
View: "At some point everything is going to go south on you. Everything is going to go south and you’re going to say 'this is it. This is how I end.' Now you can either accept that or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math, you solve one problem. Then you solve the next one, and then the next and if you solve enough problems you get to come home.”
People from the NE
Anyone read the Connecticut newspapers during GE's new HQ shopping period? They (professionally) ripped Atlanta - taking jabs at education, culture, and trying to generalize the entire area from Columbia, South Carolina to Jackson Mississippi as the same backwood slosh. I attempted a reciprocal post, relative to the Conn. newspapers. I'm trying to highlight the South's strengths by dramatically describing the weaknesses of the North and subtlely sprinkling sea salt on recent wounds (ICE buying the NYSE; ATL getting Auto HQs from NJ). The newspaper writers in Conn. don't think that everyone in Atlanta is named Mary Sue and illiterate. Likewise, I don't think people from the NE are the worst.
It's a game to us - it's politics - it's hiphop - it's a form of expression where you communicate in a non-literal sense, paint a picture. Humor, abstract, and non-literal interpretations of things can give us better insights into those things. If the reader missed my intent, it may be because I totally wiffed on this particular writing or because you live in too literal a world. Either way, it's not that big of a deal. After all, this is a sports board. Sports is a soft power institution meant for the masses like you and me to dissipate our nationalistic and passionate feelings in a friendly, competitive manner. That's a good thing! B/c these feelings have been used in many worse ways (See the Klan, 1930s Europe, any other time in human history)
FWIW, I live in a house with four other people - two from the NE, two from the South, & then me, the token brown kid. It's a real melting pot. I probably missed the tone with the OG article b/c joking about new jersey is (1) too easy and (2) so commonplace for me. But again, everyone I know from NJ is good people. I've been there only once & had a great time. . . but that won't stop me from using the "armpit of america" low-hanging fruit in a future sports argument.

Tldr: you don't have to be white trash to know yankee culture is bad for merca
 

iceeater1969

Helluva Engineer
Messages
9,014
I
Trouble with recruiting that diamond in the rough kid from Idaho is he might be the only athletic-enough, academic-enough prospect to come out of that school/county in a decade. That's what density is all about. Casting a wider net is great but you also have to concentrate on building relationships and pipelines to schools/areas that produce talent more frequently. Why fly out to Idaho to recruit one kid when you can visit Buford, Parkview. or McEachern right outside Atlanta and talk to multiple prospects and meet several other younger kids who might become offer-worthy down the line?

That's the area where improvement can have the most impact. After we signed Anaji Kerr from McEachern I did some digging and found they've sent upwards of 30 kids to play Div-1 football in the past 8 years and none of them ever go to Georgia Tech. We should OWN the Atlanta suburbs, but Paul Johnson is working on that in many ways, and it'll pay strong dividends down the line.
Red, I say dont recruit idaho.

I say recruit the hell out of atl.

I say double, triple or whatever the physical recruiting budget to get more face time in New Orleans, Tampa, dallas, houston etc to get to meet hs coaches. Grad assistant would be fine for most trips.

I want us to consider promoting brad wagoneer and getting a couple of younger versions to assist. Get one from fla and one from texas as brad lnows ga. This should help sell gt in wider area and help coaches as well as be backdoor. Get more low pay recruiting types to travel.

When I worked w todd spencer 09 10 on texas recruit( who son coached), todd said no one has time for area that far away. In 12 tried to get them come to another hs friend coached a state championship team. Duke, unc and all the big acc schools came by.
Building familiarity w hs coaches comes before relationships. These can be used to find and start the recruiting process for the tech athlete.
 

RLR

Jolly Good Fellow
Messages
355
Tldr: you don't have to be white trash to know yankee culture is bad for merca

that's the equivalent of me saying "tl;dr: you don't have to be an uneducated evangelicalist to know climate change is a liberal hoax." in the climate change thread (btw, I really enjoy that thread and your contribution to it). Effective on the surface. Ignorant of the deeper point.

You can have the last word. I think it's clear my OG post serves no beneficial purpose. And I've derailed this thread enough trying to explain it.
 
Top