Van wrote:Developing players is obviously very important but the bottom line is you won't be a consistent national title threat unless and until you're consistently winning recruiting "titles" too.
Just look at the best recruiting programs this past decade: USC, Florida, LSU and Ohio St, with OU and Texas also doing a consistent bang up job.
Now Bama is getting into the mix. Besides Bama, does anybody really see the stranglehold at the top of BTPCF shifting away any time soon from those six programs?
Before this year, Weis could make a case that he was pulling in comparable classes. The last three classes before this year were ranked #8 (probably a bit overrated, and we've lost a lot of talent from this class since that time), #8 and #2 (would've been #1 except that 'Bama actually signed more players than they had scholarships for), respectively. This year, with fewer scholarships available than in the past, we slipped to #23, but still landed a Top 10 recruit.
I won't be surprised of Tennessee begins to get a sniff again, in a couple years.
If Kiffin doesn't get them put on probation first, I'm sure he'll be in the mix in a few years.
I'm also still waiting on Oregon to really jump up and become the monster program they ought to be these days.
This one perplexes me a little bit. Oregon certainly has the financial means backing them. But it's also a school located in a relatively small state (population wise, that is) and certainly, at least, lacking the football history of the other schools you mentioned. Still, there's a huge old vacancy available for the #2 program in the Pac-10 right now, and Oregon is at least as capable as anybody else of filling it.