#1 player in MS for 2016....Ray's a better recruiter than Stans at this point.
I was never a Stans fan -- but I wouldn't go this far just yet.
What Ray is actually doing now after a few years of letting the fire smolder and missing on a couple guys is a continuation of what Stans did -- get whoever we want from MS and supplement with some pretty good OOS players, albeit without the hoopla and star power of Stans' guys until maybe the most recent OOS commit. If we land Malik, it's fairly likely both the 2015 and 2016 recruiting classes end up in the top 25 nationally if you look at the 24/7 recruiting calculator and compare total points to previous classes. That's plenty good enough.
What Ray hasn't shown the ability to do -- which is what actually kept Stans so consistently decent in the win column when the cupboard got bare -- is identify immediate needs and find/fill them in the form of transfers. Stans pulled a couple of rabbits out of his hat doing that that turned what should have been bad years into decent years and almost put us over the top with Lawrence Roberts. Of course, the flipside of that is that once you get that started, you've almost got to keep doing it, because you are never letting your team be "young" and have a true rebuilding year, and guys are transferring/getting processed too quickly to build longterm chemistry.
So, it's a different approach. Time will tell if it's as good or not...