Recent Comments
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10 years 2 weeks
# | Is Nick Saban, or Alabama's Recruiting Staff, the worst recruiting staff this year? Nick Saban losing a recruit is like Bill Gates losing a $100 bill from his pocket.
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10 years 2 weeks
# | "Dependable" DT Woody Baron Ready to Seize His Senior Season, Build on Family Legacy Gonna need him to use his speed against GT.
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10 years 2 weeks
# | "Dependable" DT Woody Baron Ready to Seize His Senior Season, Build on Family Legacy Doggone it, with attitude, dedication, and a culture like that, here I go getting all hopeful again!
Of course that's a thing.
For once I am in pretty much total agreement with you haha. NFL is always going to be biggest draw, and outside of Miami in the last 10ish years, the schools putting the most talent in the NFL also tend to field teams that win a lot of games.
"Zoinks! Like Scoob, I can't believe...."
Since I lived for a while in Hillcrest on Tech's campus long ago when it was a dedicated athletic dorm I wanted to know what the NCAA rules are now as I thought they had been eliminated a couple of decades ago. At least 50+% of the residents of such dorms must be non-athletes. I agree with Gus Malzahn in the linked article below that having teammates living together does build some sort of cameraderie and can serve as a means to impress recruits and their families. Having them close to practice locations is also a benefit. I did find it a bit of an insulator from regular student life, especially since a dining hall was on site. I never had to worry about the "concentration camp" chicken served in other dining halls then.
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10 years 2 weeks
# | "Dependable" DT Woody Baron Ready to Seize His Senior Season, Build on Family Legacy Thanks for a good article giving us insight to the man, Woody Baron. I'm looking forward to a monster senior season.
Well NCAA better get on Michigan, Clemson, Georgia, Michigan State and Notre Dame
We've seen what mediocre recruiting classes do when combing with even worse coaching.
Proximity isn't everything but its a big plus. State boundaries aren't proximity though. All of their highly rated kids are from within less than an hour of UMD. None of our targets are within an hour of VT. Not one. They can make a legitimate push to get kids to "stay home" because it essentially is home. Getting a kid from 5 hours away isn't really home. There's a huge difference between those distances. One is legitimate proximity, the other is arbitrary state lines
No rules were broken. He wasn't given the lambo. he wasn't driving it. I bet he got in it at the end of the drive.
This has nothing to do with VT keeping up and more to do with the character of the recruit. Had he picked VT he probably still would want to announce in a lambo. BR offered it to get the scoop and they got it.
If anything its an indictment on companies that make a business off of underage kids. They are not boosters and are not affiliated with schools so they are outside of NCAA bylaws.
It's flashy and crass, but looking back I bet Deon Sanders would have done this had it been offered to him and I definitely would LOVE to have had him play for VT.
But more than anything VT needs to win, and ideally win with both style and substance. Fuente needs to focus on that more than anything. He has a good track record of winning over bigger programs with lesser talent, so we should calm our tits and see if he can continue doing just that first before decrying our recruiting woes. Once he does that, and hopefully stays in Blacksburg to keep building, that's when we should be lamenting any recruiting misses.
And yes, I know, other programs are crushing us in recruiting. Winning will solve that. Whatever perception there is of VT football is what it is. Overcoming that, no matter what the reasoning, is all about winning.
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10 years 2 weeks
# | "Dependable" DT Woody Baron Ready to Seize His Senior Season, Build on Family Legacy Coffee just came out of my nose.
better pitch is getting kids to the NFL. Like you just said they've had a string of getting RBs to the NFL. Alabama is not only winning but putting out 1st/2nd rounders to the league every year as well. The winning and NFL seem to go together though.
The more talent on the team, the more you will get scouted and increase your chances of being noticed. Plus playing against top notch talent is only going to make you that much better.
How is the Bleacher Report providing the benefit to the kid on behalf of FSU any better than FSU providing it?
Is this a new ESPN 30 for 30? What is I told you a $250 Uber changed the course of the ACC forever? F$U: An Improper Benefit Story.
We can't be shocked that a major RB recruit went to FSU after several years of incredible production from their backs. Devonta's recent success in the NFL doesn't hurt either. There really is no better recruiting pitch than winning. I'm not saying we don't have some other issues when it comes to recruiting right now, but we don't have the killer location (for everyone at least, I love the area), and winning lots of games, competing for championships, is a huge draw to a high level competitor in any sport. We have other issues to address, but nothing makes recruiting easier than winning games. Additionally, if things go as planned, we will have an exciting offense to entice recruits, to go along with our winning ways. Even though we were winning games in 2006-2011, we were doing so with a pretty unappealing offense, even when we got the offense rolling in 2010 and parts of 2011. It was outdated and particularly unappealing to pretty much everyone who wasn't a stud rb, but now time will have to tell how appealing the rb position will be under Fuente.
What if I told you this Uber cost around $250... that's pocket change to BR and other sites.
their 5* DE is at IMG now but I believe he is from MD if you do look. Kid could have gone almost anywhere though.
Yep, exactly. We made our bed, now we must sleep in it. It could be an IKEA piece of crap that collapses on itself, but its still the bed we have, and we must do the best we can with the hand we've created.
(thread needs more cliche's)
Warning: I get into demographics in this comment. If you cannot maturely discuss demographics please move on or if VTG wants me to delete this post I will move on.
Great point! And it may come down to location and culture. I don't want to get into politics and current events but let's look at the demographics and location at VT. VT lists their Black student population as 950 out of 25,318 undergraduate students. That's 3.74%. The nearest large city to Blacksburg is Roanoke (if you count that). UMCP (University of Maryland College Park) has a Black student population of 4,128 students or roughly 13.2% of their campus. Nearest large city is Washington D.C. followed closely by Baltimore. I don't think distance is playing too much of a factor in decision as a lot of recruits being actively sought after by both schools are in the 4-5 hour car ride anyway.
The reason I bring this up is that it has been shown in college admissions, and yes I am extrapolating to college football recruiting, that culture matters when it comes to recruiting students from minority populations. These students have access to top tier education, some of the best support services in the country, and world class dining but they just may not feel like it's a fit when they can go nearly the entire day without seeing a Black student that isn't an athlete.
When it comes down to it, VT has a very interesting demographic. Not many schools that compete on a national level are as isolated as we are, have the same demographics as we do, and have the same record we do. When we had 10 win seasons being strung together with minimal effort, we got those big recruits. 4* and 5* commits happened then. Think Tyrod, Wilson, The Fullers, and many more. You don't see that when you have 5 or 6 L's on the schedule. The students who play for us sacrifice a fair bit. They want results from their sacrifice.
i would argue that in recruiting there isn't any one golden rule/maxim...id say that umd can at least offer being close to home, vt doesn't have that luxury. so both are mediocre (or worse) programs; one let's play in front of your friends/family every weekend, the other doesn't. i haven't looked at umd's commits yet, but id be willing to bet most are in the area.
what about iowa state and Memphis recruiting much better than their predecessors? I think we know who the previous Memphis coach was.
I think you hit it on the head right there. They do a much better job engaging recruits and keeping them interested in the football program. Our uniforms need changing as has been discussed (even more so now with putting modern numbers on the 1960s shoulder stripes). Our entire recruiting pitch is based on "stay home, come on down to Tech where it's like family, we can all sit around and have barbecues and pitch some cornhole together." That sounds absolutely fantastic to me, but 16-17 year old kids who have lived in an urban environment at the beach their entire lives are not going to really connect with the rural vibe we are pitching. I just think our message is altogether not resonating with top recruits. Winning plays some part in that, but there's a lot more we could be doing to keep our program looking fresh.
Not going to lie, after your comment, I imagined the other one saying it...