- Dec 31, 2018
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I don’t think anyone is saying stars don’t matter, but I can appreciate the idea of wanting to evaluate the players yourself to ensure that both the player really is as good as everyone says and they fit what you want at that position. I’ve noticed that there are some guys the previous regime recruited who CBN wants to keep around - most notably the DT from OK, McClellan. The others, well who knows, right? I do think that if Napier thinks a kid won’t fully buy in, he doesn’t want them in O & B no matter how many stars they have.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.
The comparison to Saban taking over in ‘07 is not a fair one. ESD is a massive game changer for new coaches now. Saban had almost a full month to evaluate the guys who were committed; Napier has ten days. To make matters worse, many of his future staff members are still finishing their seasons (another issue Saban did not have to deal with).
Napier clearly has a vision and is fully executing it. For those of us on the outside, some of it is head scratching. It may all work out fine or it may not, but I agree with his approach. He’s convinced his plan will work and he is fully implementing it his way. It’s really the only way to go and I believe he’s enough of a man to own it either way.