I don't think my take on this is revolutionary or even uncommon on this board, but I will add my voice to the discussion because it is the offseason and we don't play roundball again for greater than 24 hours. I would submit all winning programs focus on varying degrees of: scheme, recruiting and coaching excellence. I don't particularly care what combination we use to get back to being a winning program, as long as we don't abandon our mission to educate and build more than just the athletic abilities of our student athletes. Most importantly, I support GT and cheer for the athletes we field.
While Johnson was here, he opted to over-index on Scheme and Coaching Excellence while ceding the recruiting battle. I felt good about this, as most of the unseemly things in College Athletics happen around getting kids into the school or keeping them “eligible” despite not learning. His approach let us avoid the increasingly difficult war of escalation that comes from chasing recruiting rankings. It is increasingly difficult to walk the fine line of staying legit while chasing a limited pool of players. It allowed us to walk away from operating off a plan that required us go against larger, better funded programs for a critical few, key recruits. To beat them at their game, we would have had to make up ground on both the allowable pieces (recruiting staff sizes, campus upgrades, program spending, tutoring) as well as combat the unallowable financial investment and morally ambiguous academic standards (bag men, fake classes, watered down majors, et all) some of our competitors operated under. After struggling under CCG, CPJ brought a new option pun intended that allowed us to go after the type of athletes who fit our scheme and bypass that issue.
He had a good run, we competed at the top of the conference and I really enjoyed learning the ins and outs of a scheme that was uncommon and allowed us to be uncommonly good despite the lack of 5 star players up and down the roster. Most importantly, it allowed us to operate a clean program. Our guys were studs, and we had some dudes roll through who were pound for pound better than most of the 4/5 star recruits we beat.
We saw that experiment come into sharp relief when CPJ stepped down, and the administration did a full 180 degree turn. Running full sprint the other way towards having scheme serve recruiting. This stark shift in strategy has left many of us (myself included) worried about becoming unmoored. Our scheme the last two seasons, on both Offense and Defense, has been charitably "Multiple" but detractors may call it muddled. The competitive edge we focused on under CPJ (scheme enabling talent not talent enabling scheme) has been abandoned.
When uncertainty shows up, people often run to their biggest fears. For most of us, that is either straight up failure or something worse: winning in a way that offends our sensibilities. Many of the posters on this board, and in our fanbase, seem to think there are only two choices. A binary decision to either give in to “dirty crooting” or suffer in mediocrity because we won’t.
Collins is building a third approach. He is trying to use marketing and hype to over index on recruiting to build success and then banking that if he builds a winning program we can sell what we have to kids looking at Stanford/Notre Dame/Northwesten/Texas to keep it going. There are academic powerhouses who have regularly been able to pull in dudes who want to make the League but also gain a great education. At this point in my personal version of A tale of two Cities (GT Edition), you might be asking why this would be different from what CCG tried or even guys like Pepper back in the day. The answer is the NIL and the Transfer Portal. GT is betting that Collins can market us into having the kind of place we can pluck enough talent in the near term (either winning critical battles in High School Recruiting or jump starting that by bringing in kids disillusioned with their role at “better” programs) to build us into a destination for the kids looking to get a great education AND play high level football.
What I hope, and anticipate seeing, is that this will work. I think we have got better coaches than people have given us credit for and looking at the roster overhaul the last few years think we finally have the mix we needed of guys who can compete in traditional schemes. We have some solid returning players who have made the shift back from the confusion of D Schemes we had under CPJ and the monumental shift on O we have made to go from the 3Option to the spread, speed, “ProStyle” we run under CDP.
All this to say, for the fans out there worried that we will have to ultimately chose between cheating or losing under this direction, have faith. If the marketing works, and NIL goes as some of us are expecting, we can be a desirable place again for biGTime student athletes without giving up our scruples or the mission that SHOULD be at the center of any NCAA Sport endeavor, education and improving the lives of our players. CGC knows he has a window to get us back to winning before people give up on the experiment. I do think we see improvement this year, and believe we have to get to .500 to stay on track.
Once we start winning, things get easier and easier (no one wanted to be at Clemson, till Clemson was Clemson). We do have to put up this season though. No more excuses (legitimate as they may be with the rebuild, then pandemic). It is time to start winning again.
