Some recruiting rankings are in and the rich get richer for the most part: http://scout.scout.com/a.z?s=73&p=9&c=14&yr=2007 Interesting that Tenn and Fulmer stay in the hunt recruiting wise and also Spurrier is pulling in some top talent along with another ex-Gator coach Zook at Ill. Neb. is getting some renewed interest as well. Notables missing from the top 20 include Bama, Miami, Oklahoma and.................. Florida State who checks in at #53 :shock: :lol:
Zook's success is mystifying. He is pulling in top national talent to a dead program at state school in a crappy area. And I'm not buying the early playing time argument either because some of these guys would start anywhere. :?:
Irish class this year is very unbalenced, we have a great group of offensive players comming in, but very few defensive players. QB. 1 RB 1 OL 5 TE 1 WR 3 That's 11 of our 18, and we had a weak defensive class last year. Charlie is not solving our problems on defense. This is a major problem. The defensive players he has are good, but not nearly enough and time is getting short. There is a good chance that we won't sign any more players, I hope I'm wrong and that there are some defensive players out there that we don't know about or something like that but it's looking bad.
The other thing I notice is that USC has only 14 players yet they are ranked #4 because of those 14 players 11 are national top 100 players, Fla only has 6 national top 100 players, the Irish only have 5.... And most likely every player that USC gets from here on out will also be a top 100 player. If they close well they could be looking at the best class in the history of recruiting rankings.
Not having a coach for over a month hurt us. It seems though that we only lost one commit and with Saban on board we may be able to recover somewhat. I think we only have 18 scholarships to give so our totals may be low. I wish we could get 18 offensive and defensive linemen.
I think given the time frame Alabama will have a good class, just not a great class. It's really hard to have a great class when you change coaches. In most instances that transition class is smaller and poorer in quality than the 1st class where the new coach has a full year of recruiting. I think the whole thing with recruiting is building relationships with these kids, when a new coach comes into the picture they just don't have the time to do that. In our last 3 coaching changes, Davie, Willingham and Weis. Their transition classes were small, the next class for all 3 were great classes. Davie's was #4 as was Willinghams and Charlies was top 5, I forget where. After than Davie and Willingham fell off a lot as the kids saw the direction of the program and the product on the field. Charlies 3rd class will be much better than either Davie or Willingham but not up to the haul that Holtz brought in after the 87 season (his 3rd class or 2nd full class, 1st class was the transition class after 85 season when Faust was fired). Terry
Terry, Agreed. Also under the NCAA sanctions we had fewer schollies to give the last 4 or 5 years so we have fewer seniors leaving therefore fewer openings this year so we will only have 18 scholarships to offer. Shula actually recruited well so assuming that Saban is able to get a decent class and is able to use the talent that Shula left, we should be fine. I have never cared much for recruiting class ranking because it is much better to get the players you need rather than recruit for ratings. I'm not too worried.....yet.
Kp, As good a recruiter as is Ron Zook he didn't have as much time as Saban to get his 1st class together and yet he did OK...putting a class together that was ranked somewhere around #22 or 23. Pretty decent given the circumstances....and he landed Wynn, Ciatrick Fason, Jemalle Cornelius and couple of other pretty good players that year.
Sid, I hope that works out, interviews of Nuss indicate that he's excited about the prospects, haven't seen anything about the other guy. I hope it works out, both of those guys are a little on the tall side for the typical DL. Although UM's AA DT Branch was a tall guy. I'd much prefer though that we had more DL's comming into this class. But hopefully the new defensive staff will get our guys to play great. The one place we are starting to build talent with speed is DB, if we can just get a push up front with the DL's and LB's we should be OK. Also I'm reading that the new DC is possibly a 3-4 defense guy...don't know what that means or wheter or not it makes any difference. Terry
re: Florida State #53 Reading the FSU boards is a lot of fun. When Chris Little was committed there, they were celebrating and boasting about "reloading" and always having the best talent. When he switched to Notre Dame, they claimed he was "fat, slow, unathletic etc." For the record, the Noles have signed ONE player in the national Top 100 or the Florida 50 the last time I looked. They could have used a Chris Little... :wink:
They are the worst at glamorizing their own signees while detracting from others. BB will probably resort to last minute non-qualifiers again as he usually does just to get his haul up in the spotlight.
James Wilson (Nease HS o-lineman) to UF <t>I see that Scout is reporting a swith by James Wilson from USCw to UF. Wilson is a 5-star o-lineman, #2 OG.</t>
The next three I hope fall the way of UF are: Carlos Dunlap - UF, USCe Cam Heyward - UF, OSU, UGa Major Wright - UF, OSU, ND, and I gues USCw. then: Thompson - UF, OSU, Miami Hicks - UF, Clemson Toliver - UF, LSU Culliver - UF, USCe, FSU followed by: Brown - to Juco/prep Devine - to Juco/prep
Major Wright will be at ND this weekend. I hope they close him out, he'll get to meet our new NFL trained DCoord!!! Who for what it is worth is a young dynamic black person. Very well educated, one of the few Michigan players to graduate and to graduate with a real degree, English!! Hopefully if Major wants to play in the NFL and get an Ivy league level education he'll come to ND. 8)
Some of the recruiting "specialists" on Gator Country are calling M Wright an unpublicized commitment to UF. Looks like it will be down to NLI signing day before these last few slots are settled.
MCG, Yeah that's where I think we will settle out this year somewhere in the 20's, but more importantly, at least imo is getting some quality linemen on both sides of the ball.
It's reported out of Ocala, FL tha Nick Saban is calling on several of Trinity Catholic's kids - Brantly(UF), Lecorn (USCe), and Allen (USCe). I just hope UF is able to somehow offer and sign DT John Brown out of Lakeland HS. It's sounding as though he'll sign with Alabama if the UF "admissions clearinghouse" doesn't accept his grades/scores which is necessary for an official visit to and LOI from UF.