I fear our posters may not initially embrace CBN's recruiting. His repeated emphasis on evaluation suggests to me that his evaluation may frequently disagree with the recruiting services evaluation so beloved by donk and otbrrs.
It’s not just Donk, or myself, or a handful of others that highly value the recruiting services and their equally proven evaluations. It’s literally every team that has won a NC over the past few decades. Napier said as much in his opener, referencing the recruiting rankings of Alabama and uga and the fact that they played for the SEC the night before.
So to shift now into this “stars don’t matter” conversation is ridiculous.
I’ll repeat what I said prior to BN’s hiring, and again voiced last week. My concern is that we might be once again having to stomach an approach that is contrary to conventional wisdom out of “trust”. I say maybe, because it’s obviously way too early to say anything definitive. But we’ve gone from a complete identity change in ‘11, to a trust that somehow a coach is so good he can win with 2-3*’s in ‘15, to we don’t need to recruit because we can outscheme everyone in 2018, to now this. I don’t know why we have to complicate things. We know what works. So it’s frustrating to see and hear an approach that by his own admission may not make much sense at times and may take some patience. I don’t get why we can’t just be normal and do what UF does best.
Spurrier showed it can be done, as did Meyer. Yes they inherited better situations, but they also held on to guys like Baker, Haupt and Murphy who were marginal players that committed to the previous staff and were open to suitors after the change. It would’ve been easy to dismiss them. He didn’t. And much of the rest of that class were players that we’d targeted all year with Zook. He simply landed them and built off of it. Saban’s 2007 class was similar. Those guys know how to evaluate too, and both of them would’ve taken Gibson, Lightsey and probably Evers in their transition class, just from a perception standpoint.
I’m hopeful for Wednesday and beyond, and will again say that I want to see Napier kill it here for a long time. Really like a lot of what he brings to the table. But if we fumble things the rest of the way, I’m also not blindly falling into line and saying everything is fine because “we have a better idea” as former commits are snatched up by teams that either have are in the playoff this year or have been recently.