Let’s break this down:
You completely misunderstood the intent of my comment. Hall was a film room guy and a completely uninspiring figure. His recruiting mirrored it. It’s not deflection or opinion or anything else, it’s fact. Our recruiting was immediately impacted by Pell’s departure, to the point where by the late-‘80s we had, beyond Emmitt Smith, a very average roster.
It is most assuredly not fact - its opinion. You know what is fact? Pell’s cheating landed some of the worst sanctions - if not THE worst - sanctions this school has ever received. Opinion: crippling sanctions impact recruiting. And as you say, cheating went out the window in 84, including paying players. If you don’t think those two thing alone helped Pell outrecruit Hall, I don’t know what to tell you.
Think Miami mid-‘90s under Butch Davis. He was a recruiting machine. They got very good, he left for the NFL and bald-headed, poker-faced Larry Coker takes over, the wind very much at his back. One problem. Coker couldn’t recruit. What happened to Miami after a few empty seasons?
Coker was a lousy coach all around. There is a reason Miami was his only shot. They hired him based on emotion and got burned plain and simple.
What happened at UF was very similar. The Pell cheating involved spying on other teams’ practices, payments and gifts to players. Yes, it was cheating. Would he have been successful had he not cheated? You can ask that question right here, and probably the vast majority of respondents from this board will tell you yes, he would have.
It’s possible but we will never know. What we do know is that he cheated - a lot - at the two biggest schools he coached at. He was part of a failed staff at UK that all got fired too. Not saying that was his fault but he was certainly a part of the failure.
Go back and look at the list of players recruited by Pell from my previous post and tell me that wasn’t a solid list of athletes. You’re young and probably don’t know them to the degree an older Gator would.
That’s a great list of players and I do know them - the internet is a treasure trove of information. Do you think they come here if he was not paying them? You could argue that others might have tried Too but he probably outbid them - which is probably why he got caught in the first place. He was going above and beyond what others were doing at two different schools.
Implying my age has to do with lack of understanding is misguided - in fact, I would argue that your bias is prohibiting this conversation more than anything. You really liked Pell. Got it. Dude was a cheat - and that is fact as it was proven AND he admitted it.