and if we do give him a chance in 2012, or if he does well enough this year to get himself through to 2012, I think he will be able to get things turned around well enough to stick around for a while.
Regardless, I care a lot less about who is coaching us and more about whether we win. If we did end up firing him after next season, and we go out and make a decent hire, we'll be able to win fairly quickly with a new coach. That's what matters to me.
The worst situation is if you have to fire a coach AND rebuild. I don't think we're that far away when you add this class to the previous two. We still have some areas that need added depth in next year's class, namely RB and a few more D-linemen depending on how our young DL do this fall, but overall the cupboard won't be "bare" as they say if we did make a coaching change.
And yes I still count our 2009 class as a solid class, because I don't get caught up in the rankings. We still have 23 players (21 non specialists) left on our roster from that class, and that's not counting Tim Simon who may or may not return from his 2009 knee injury. I'd say at least 8 of those players have already proven they are good enough to be regular contributors at the SEC level (with a handful of them clearly above average SEC talents), and I would say another 5-6 of them have potential and haven't had the chance to show it yet due to the depth chart at their positions.
I think the ideal recruiting class ends up giving you 4-5 players that you could say are clearly above average SEC players, and another 8-10 that are average SEC caliber talent. The rest will either quit/get kicked off or just toil on the bench for 4 years. That's going to happen in every class. I'm talking strictly about the high school signees, not the Jucos by the way. I think our 2009 class will end up close to those numbers in terms of high school signee contributors.
Our 2006 class was so good because it gave us 7-8 players that you would probably say were above average SEC talent and another 7-8 that I would say were at least average SEC caliber. The rest either didn't make it, quit, were Jucos, or just weren't that good. Our 2007 class, on the other hand, was so bad because as far as high school talent goes, we only got 6 high school players that I would say were at least average SEC players, and that's being generous. Our 2008 class was poor because it only gave us 7 or 8 players that I would say are average SEC talent, with only maybe 1 of those I would say as above average at this point. Those 2007 and 2008 classes were the downfall of our 2010 season, and they're the reason why most of us knew it was going to be a rebuilding year. The hope was that our schedule and Masoli would give us a chance to mask the rebuilding year a little bit, but it didn't work out that way.
Anyway, that's how I follow recruiting and why I follow it. If you understand what level of players you need and how many of them you need from each class, usually you can figure out how strong a class was within 2 years of it signing. If you follow the recruiting process, you can get a good idea how many of your signees have SEC potential (you hope it's over 20), and after a few years, you can have a good idea if enough of those players were as good as you needed them to be. Go back and do the same for your 2007, 08, and 09 classes. It's not hard to see, even when you look at it on an individual player level, if you recruited well in a particular class.
