tenureplan said:
Look what O did recruiting wise at OM while never really winning any big games.
He went after a bunch of borderline academic guys and sold them on the fact that he could get them in...and he did.
Of course, it led to a higher attrition rate in some of those classes, and his final class was decimated because our academic committee forced him to limit the academic chances he took in the class due to APR concerns. Then we took an APR hit because of his strategy.
He went in and won a handful of big head to head battles for guys that did have grades, but he made up a lot of his classes with guys he was taking chances on, some which worked out really well, others that didn't. Kentrell Lockett, Ted Laurent, John Jerry, Michael Oher, Marcus Tillman, Marshay Green, Jonathon Cornell, and Jerrell Powe are some of the chances he took that clearly worked out well. Jamal Harvey, Chris Strong, Rod Davis, Scottie Williams, AJ Jackson, Terry Levy, and others didn't quite work out as well.
I do give him and his staff credit for out-evaluating other staffs on a lot of players though. Guys like Mike Wallace, Shay Hodge, Dexter McCluster, Lawon Scott, Cassius Vaughn, and Kendrick Lewis were all players that were not that highly recruited by other programs, and they did a good job picking them out, but for the most part the successes of his recruiting were not built by beating out LSU, Tennessee, Auburn, etc. head to head for players that they had high on their lists.
If you're going to build a program off recruiting without winning to back it up, I think you have to be a very shrewd evaluator, and you will probably have to take some chances on guys that aren't as academically strong, which is something we still both do, being that Mississippi is our key recruiting ground.
