Why recruiting matters, and the importance of signing day

[cm husker]

And here's a great article on why the NCAA, similar to the DEA, will never remain tied with, let alone ahead of, the people motivated by real dollars to find an edge.

That's why the entire thing should be simplified. Coaches can do what they want, minus payoffs, and parents and players would have easy access to a no contact list that would be strictly enforced.

http://www.si.com/more-sports/2008/06/23/recruiting-main

 

[BigRedBuster]

Oh, and for the person who was arguing that dead periods aren't as much about protecting a coach's time as an athletes, have a look at the NCAAs statement: http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2013/10/30/ncaa-board-of-directors-football-recruiting-all-star-games-dead-period/3317441/

You do realize we were talking about the no contact period right around signing day....correct? These are totally different than the winter dead period over the holidays. I'm pretty sure I mentioned this before and you chose to completely ignore it.

 

[cm husker]

Oh, and for the person who was arguing that dead periods aren't as much about protecting a coach's time as an athletes, have a look at the NCAAs statement: http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2013/10/30/ncaa-board-of-directors-football-recruiting-all-star-games-dead-period/3317441/

You do realize we were talking about the no contact period right around signing day....correct? These are totally different than the winter dead period over the holidays. I'm pretty sure I mentioned this before and you chose to completely ignore it.

The person I was speaking to in that thread was taking about bowl season being the reason for the dead period. To prevent unfair advantage to non-bowl teams (a silly reason to begin with, even if true).

I don't recall you ever mentioning a dead period near signing day issue to me. Nor do I find those anything other than purely protectionary. Designed mainly to prevent coaches from flipping other coaches' recruits.

 

[huskerhill]

At what point does this thread get locked up?

 

[Enhance]

Do coaches leverage the "reporters" to pressure players and get around contact rules? Absolutely. That's another good reason to kill the contact rules.

Enhance, I was referring to the top 200 or so evaluations not being materially different than 20 years ago and that after that, the services aren't that great, even now.

I get you have a vested interest in the recruiting industrial complex, but of those "dozens" of people that you refer to, how many are talent evaluators versus marketing experts? I posted artivles another thread and can't pull it up on my phone, but basically, the average reporter at these sites makes less than $15k a year. It's a part time and often free lance gig. Few make a sustainable living doing evaluations. Most are treating it like beat reporters on the minor league baseball circuit treat it: a step toward a better reporting job.

There is of course an important distinction between consumer facing products like rivals, scout and ESPN and the coach facing products that focus on film production to enhance evaluation. The first are hardly used by the coaches, except to work around NCAA rules, as I mentioned before. The second have value, but they must be fretting over the NCAA lifting recruiting staff restrictions. There's a decent chance a large share of their market will start insourcing that work.

Most of the people I know are a mix between writers/analysts that cover recruiting and the talent evaluator/video service experts. It's a pretty wide range of people that I draw my information from and most of them do this is as a full time career, so I know they're not making 15k or less. The amount of them doing it TODAY is really the basis of the conversation compared to what was being done two decades ago, and I can without a doubt say that the time, resources and money now put into recruiting services (both for coaches and fans) is substantially different.

I can also tell you that, again, I think you will find yourself on a very lonely island if you think the analysis put into top recruits, and even all recruits, is similar to what happened 20 years ago. That goes for prospect #1 all the way down to prospect #500. Nowadays, exponentially more recruits are being given pretty much unlimited access to coaches and talent evaluators through organizations like Hudl.

If you put the amount of resources today into what was being done in 1991, I can say with really no doubt in my mind that the top 200 would probably look fairly different purely based on the amount of critique and information available for players now.

To put together a silly, but I think applicable example, consider finding a spouse/partner nowadays. Do you think it was the same in 1991 as it is in 2016? Today, you have dozens if not hundreds of different mediums to meet people due to advances in the internet. Personal travel and connectivity is also wildly different. That means your pool of applicants, and your ability to find out about them, is so varied. It's for those reasons I think the landscape has changed so drastically.

 

[BigRedBuster]

Oh, and for the person who was arguing that dead periods aren't as much about protecting a coach's time as an athletes, have a look at the NCAAs statement: http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2013/10/30/ncaa-board-of-directors-football-recruiting-all-star-games-dead-period/3317441/

You do realize we were talking about the no contact period right around signing day....correct? These are totally different than the winter dead period over the holidays. I'm pretty sure I mentioned this before and you chose to completely ignore it.

The person I was speaking to in that thread was taking about bowl season being the reason for the dead period. To prevent unfair advantage to non-bowl teams (a silly reason to begin with, even if true).
I don't recall you ever mentioning a dead period near signing day issue to me. Nor do I find those anything other than purely protectionary. Designed mainly to prevent coaches from flipping other coaches' recruits.

It was during the discussion of an early signing date.

 

[cm husker]

If you're who I was talking to, buster, you're remembering wrong. The discussion was about the supposed rule around bowl period dead periods. Feel free to bump the the thread if you think I'm remembering wrong.

Why won't you address the pros or cons of my current point, which is to eliminate dead periods in favor of a no contact list?

 

[BigRedBuster]

If you're who I was talking to, buster, you're remembering wrong. The discussion was about the supposed rule around bowl period dead periods. Feel free to bump the the thread if you think I'm remembering wrong.

Why won't you address the pros or cons of my current point, which is to eliminate dead periods in favor of a no contact list?

It's not a big deal. I just thought you were referring to a different conversation. No reason to waste any more time on it.

As to your proposal, I think it would be a nightmare to manage and would be rampant with corruption. I have no problem with the dead period over the holidays so the coaches and the recruits can take a breath and relax. The major changes that need to be made in the entire schedule is OVs over the summer and paying for parents to travel. That would take care of a lot of the problems.

 

[cm husker]

Why would it be a nightmare to manage?

I envision a very simple mechanism: parent or recruit simply goes to a NCAA site and adds a university to its no contact list. The coach gets an email. If the coach or university continues to contact the player, the family can simply report the contact (by going right back to the site). If they don't, then they obviously didn't feel harmed by it.

It would be much simpler than the current system, which requires coaches to inform on each other and is rife with illegal contact.

Early OVs and paying for guardians is important. But I don't think it cleans up the issues we are talking about. Which is, the current rules unfairly benefit schools of closer proximity and artificially and clumsily restricts access to information by cutting off contact between two sets of people who could be entering into a contract that might be the single most important of the player's life (other than marriage).

 

[BigRedBuster]

BTW...I believe during the dead periods, the recruit can contact the coach if he so chooses but the coach can not contact the recruit.

So, if I am right about that, the recruit really isn't cut off from information if he has a question for a particular coach or program.

 

[BigRedBuster]

In all of these things, you have to keep it simple. The more complex you make it, the easier it is to cheat the system. I think it would be very difficult to police.

I thought I suggested a pretty simple solution to people wanting players to be able to change schools without punishment. I simply said the player can move wherever they want. But, the program the player goes to, loses a scholarship and the program he is leaving gets an additional scholarship.

I thought that was simple but was told it was too complex and difficult to manage.

 

[cm husker]

The scholarship thing doesn't even make sense. Why would a team get a bonus schollie by running a kid off to a lesser d1 school, for example?

 

[BigRedBuster]

The scholarship thing doesn't even make sense. Why would a team get a bonus schollie by running a kid off to a lesser d1 school, for example?

You totally miss the idea.

My fear was ( and still is with this proposal) that teams like OSU, Alabama, LSU...etc. would rob players from programs like ISU, Kansas, Kentucky...etc. If that happens, that would be a disaster for those programs.

And...my proposal makes as much sense or more than yours.

 

[cm husker]

Oh, so you would have a complex set of rules about which schools would owe scholarships and when based on the outcome you want to engineer, even if that means freezing a student athelete's ability to pursue what may be a better option for him.

Just out of curiosity, are you a democrat?

 

[Making Chimichangas]

Currently this year Ohio State has recruited 16 (4 and 5 star) elite players in this years class. In 2013 they landed 18 elite (4 and 5 star) players.

In the past few years Alabama has recruited as many as 22 elite players (4 and 5 star)... in one class.

Recruiting matters. Recruiting elite or the very best talent is crucial to have the best chance at winning a national championship, that is true.

Wanna know what else is crucial to winning national championships?

1. Having great coaches
2. Having schemes the players can execute at a high level while minimizing mistakes and mental errors
3. Staying healthy
4. Developing your players
5. Consistently watching film and improving your game
6. Players being team oriented and more wanting to win than padding their stats
7. Having players with excellent work ethic
8. Players staying out of trouble off the field
9. Players taking their school work seriously
10. Fortuitous calls by refs that save a team's season
11. Lucky breaks/bounces of the ball

Stated plainly, recruiting great/elite talent is crucial certainly. But there are so many other factors which go into how a team does, to try and reduce it all to just recruiting is absurd.