Georgia Tech recruiting in the 5 stars era
Georgia Tech Football under Paul Johnson recruits the old fashioned way; finding players on their own.
over 1 year ago
cuttysark
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Stop it already
This is like the 4th or 5th such “It’s not that we can’t get the 5* recruits, it’s that CPJ doesn’t want them!!! High five!!!” topic I’ve seen on this site.
CPJ has offered a bunch of 5* players schollies since he’s been at Tech, and none of them have chosen to go there. Why? I’ll go position by position:
QB: Very few top QB’s want to play in an offense where they run 4 times more than they pass. Top QB’s want to go pro, and this system is the absolute worst for that.
RB: RB’s want to be THE guy, not one of the guys. Stud RB’s want to go to a system where they are the star, not an option.
OL: In the pros, diving at other people’s knees is not an accepted blocking technique.
WR: Would you want to go to a place where you will MAYBE get thrown at 5 times a game?
Defense: CPJ has nothing to sell. He is famous for his offense, and his DC just got fired after a terrible coaching stint at UVA. Yes, I know he coached in the NFL, but that was 10 years ago, and most of these kids have probably never even heard of Bill Parcells.
Look, you have a great football tradition, a passionate fanbase, a great location, are in a recruiting hot bed, have good academics, and are in a competitive conference. There is absolutely nothing about your institution holding you back; the issue is in coaching. Look how much the team has declined as more and more of CPJ’s players are starting to filter in. So quit complaining about how recruiting services are wrong (I mean come on, the heart of your ACC champ. team were all highly rated players) and start considering whether CPJ is really the coach you all think he is.
You've missed the point of the article
Recruiting sites are not all that accurate, and there’s more to football than just getting the most 5-star guys on your team. Coaching is a key aspect of college football, identifying and exploiting favorable matchups.
Also, I agree that most 5-star, offensive guys do not want to come to Tech because it’s difficult to get to the NFL. However, the idea of the option offense is that you can get favorable matchups and don’t always have to have the superior athlete. Also, I disagree with your assessment of Al Groh. He was successful at UVA as a defensive coordinator…he just was clueless as to what to do with the other side of the ball, and wasn’t such a great head coach.
Good Article
There’s always a stigma with the recruiting websites, and frankly, outside of the top players, it’s usually a wash…some are great, some are terrible, and some are average. You just have to trust the coaches on this one…and get lucky.
elfcrash...
is more focused on the tired and worn out argument that this is not the program to go play in if you want to go to the NFL. That attitude fits quite nicely with the recent NCAA commercials that were played throughout every football game this season and increasing in frequency during the bowl games that said; “there are 40,000 student athletes who will be going pro in something other than sports” But for those people that think the NFL is a full time job, the reality is that 99.9% of all college players will be a very large contingent of that 40,000. That is why they are all called student athletes.
As for some of the other groundless statements; “that Stud RB’s want to be the Star not an option”, all I can say is that every coach at any level talks about TEAM. No coach cares to have some 18 year old dictate to him how they will be used on the team. By the way, the other 10 people on the playing field in any offense that don’t have the football are blocking regardless of what scheme they are running. That is reality!
Ok, I'm going to ignore the first paragraph because I can't really make sense of it
As to second, a RB who wants to go pro wants to go to a school where there is one running back job. That is how you get numbers, attention, and the paycheck at the end of all of it. As far as the blocking, you’re right, everyone is blocking. But blocking in the option is different than option in pro style or even spread schemes. Option blocking is a lot more quick, cut blocks rather than the sustained blocking you see in the NFL. The option is a great, fun offense. It just doesn’t train kids well for the NFL.
The only position
that doesn’t get prepared for the NFL in an option offense is the quarterback. The running backs and receivers are fine in the NFL, and the offensive linemen can be serviceable, especially in the interior. It may take some time to retrain them to pass block. Much of college football is running a spread option offense (out of the shotgun), which has similar blocking “duration,” if that’s a term, so I don’t see that being a big negative…it’s the technique to pass block that’s the problem. Most young offensive linemen in the NFL have to work on pass blocking anyway, but more so with those coming from this offense.
You'd think Georgia Tech fans, more than any other college football fans, would be willing to consider the math on recruiting.
The data is clear; recruiting rankings matter:
Yes, that annual defense of recruiting rankings is published under the banner of a site that sells recruiting rankings. But that doesn’t make it any less accurate.
I am proud to be a Kennesaw State Fighting Owl. -- Vince Dooley
Right
…and the tobacco industry says that there’s no link between smoking and lung cancer.
There are two reasons why they can claim that their rankings matter: the rankings are based off of the teams that are recruiting them. If top schools are fighting over a player, then he must be good, and they give that guy an extra star or two. Also, they’re usually pretty accurate for the top 100-150 recruits or so. After that, they’re just a sea of 3-star guys that could go either way.
The coaches always have a better idea of the player than these recruiting sites: their work ethic, whether or not they’ve peaked, level of competition, etc. These factors typically have the most effect a prospect’s total worth to the team in the end anyway. I’m not saying that I’m proud that Tech has recruited lesser athletes this season than in seasons past (as elfcrash would have you believe), but I’m not convinced that those recruits are lesser football players.
At least with the Tobacco industry there's other studies that contradict them.
Like he said, of all people, Tech fans should understand the value of good statistics.
And there's not in recruiting?
By the way, statistics are constantly misinterpreted. In this case, the bias in the data makes the results useless.
Are you unfamiliar with the way the stars are assigned?
The players that are recruited by the successful schools get more stars that those recruited by the bad schools. If Texas and Oklahoma are fighting over a player, he gets at least four stars…for that fact alone. That’s the definition of bias in the data.
If that were true
Then Texas, OU, Bama, Florida, USC, etc. would never get 3* or below recruits, would they? According to your theory, players get stars based on who is recruiting them, which would mean that everyone that is being recruited by at least 2-3 big programs would always be 5*. Conversely, any player not recruited by one of the top 10 programs would never get 4/5*.
But that’s not true, is it? Before you continue this, I would suggest you actually look up how the stars are assigned.
Actually, there's much more to it than that.
For example, and this is just one example, after this year’s All-American Bowl several four-stars and five-stars saw their ratings adjusted based on performance.
But why shouldn’t a rating service take into account which schools are recruiting a player? You don’t trust Nick Saban’s talent evaluations over Western Kentucky’s? I love how the argument is “Coaches, not services, know players. Therefore services should not pay attention to which coaches want which players.” Huh?
Nobody’s saying ratings are perfectly assigned on a player-by-player basis. But it’s a simple fact that recruiting rankings as a whole do a very good job of predicting which players will be successful, whether schools with subpar class rankings like it or not.
I am proud to be a Kennesaw State Fighting Owl. -- Vince Dooley
recruiting rankings
are solely based off what schools are looking at the same player ( as referenced by acedarney) not on their play ability…. im pretty sure that the actual coaches know the players better than whoever does recruiting rankings.
oh and has anybody ever heard of a guy named Demaryius Thomas??
and elfcrash.. if you dont like all Tech stuff being posted on a Tech blog… then leave
This is my Family Tradition
by The_GT_LineageX11 on Feb 12, 2011 10:11 PM EST reply actions
I don't mind only Tech stuff being posted on this blog
In fact I like reading a lot of the articles on this site. I just think it’s ridiculous that so many of you are making up excuses for CPJ’s inability to recruit. You can say whatever you want, but there is a correlation between recruiting success and sustained winning.
Demaryius Thomas was a 3* and was named to the All-State team as a Senior. It’s not like he just showed up unannounced at Bobby Dodd one day. Oh, and he wasn’t recruited by CPJ.
he (thomas) may have been recruited by gailey
but he was a three star and thats who were getting…. but he came up and made a name for himself under CPJ
This is my Family Tradition
by The_GT_LineageX11 on Feb 14, 2011 6:29 PM EST up reply actions
Right on point; The_GT_LineageX11...
about Demaryius Thomas. From an obscure high school couple of stars player to the #1 receiver taken in the NFL draft. The scouts just gushed over his BLOCKING ability that he learned on the Flats under Paul Johnson’s staff! The epitome of a TEAM player.
Another 5 starless player who was actually a “walk on” in college at USC and turned out to be another 1st round NFL player that was last seen playing this past Super Bowl Sunday; Clay Matthews of the Green Bay Packers. Guess his utter lack of stars and humble beginnings as a scout team guy didn’t matter when the NFL came calling and selected him anyway.
Yes and Aaron Rodgers went JUCO before Cal
Driver went to Alcorn and Big Ben went to Miami(OH). Recruiting rankings aren’t meant to project pro talent, but college talent; and statistically, they’re pretty accurate. As I’ve said before, there’s absolutely no reason Tech shouldn’t be able to attract at least mid-range to top talent. There’s no reason you can’t bring in a class like the Class of ’06 every year, and you saw how effective CPJ was with them.
Not the response I predicted
I would have thought that the response here to the lack of 5* talent (at least on offense) would be that the stars aren’t measuring for success in the option offense. The option offense highlights different skills and attributes than pro-style offenses. For example, a QB who knows the game and runs well but doesn’t throw well in traffic would be more valuable at Tech than at a lot of other schools. Perhaps we could say that the stars are measuring the octane of gasoline, but CPJ runs his offense on diesel.
Instead, the response is that stars don’t matter. That’s a much harder proposition to prove. Of course the recruiting sites miss a lot and of course there is bias in the data, but does anybody think that a roster comprised wholly of 2*s will beat a roster comprised wholly of 5*s in the long run? The star system does not perfectly correlate with success, but it does not negatively correlate, either.
I expected someone to explain how CPJ succeeded despite the apparent lack of recruiting stars on the roster. Instead, it seems like the response is to explain the recruiting system away.
Exactly.
Another big question: can this system succeed for the long term without landing top talent? By “succeed” I mean “do significantly better than Chan Gailey pretty much every year.”
And that question has not yet been answered — two out of three is not conclusive.
I am proud to be a Kennesaw State Fighting Owl. -- Vince Dooley
Agreed
While the sample size is relatively small and surely not complete (CPJ using Gailey recruits, etc), I’d still say CPJ was immediately successful from the simple fact that he actually won the ACC, something Gailey couldn’t do with his or anyone else’s recruits. Conversely, CPJ also handed us our worst season in what, 14 years? So there’s always that.
As for your question, that is the exact same though I and others have discussed and we all agree that we do not believe he can be successful recruiting “lesser” talent as a whole. He has to start landing better talent or else no system will save him, especially on defense and regardless of what service compiles the player rankings. He doesn’t need 32 signings cough SC cough and he doesn’t need 20 four- and five-star recruits, but he isn’t going to get away with recruiting the leftovers each year, not in the southeast with 15 schools surrounding the area all looking at the same players, and not in a BCS conference that wants to run with the SEC*.
*Or at least the fans do. I’m still undecided if Swofford and the ACC actually have any real determination to promote the league as a contender.
We’ve already seen the results of losing our best talent from arguable the best class GT has had in the last decade. If he has many more seasons like last year, no matter the circumstances, he simply won’t last.
"You could spend the next fifteen seconds of your life watching a man and a tiger scream together, or you could be an idiot."
Fact.
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