3074326;1640405; said:
One thing is more important than recruiting - development. We get top-tier talent no matter what this year makes you think. We'll still get top-tier talent this year. Did we get any who played in the Army All-American game? No. But we still got and will get top talent in the country.
I hear what you're saying, but I would like to make one point. I think the talent you get is every bit as important--if not more important--than player development. Regardless, you've got to have both if you want to win championships. Especially when the Nick Sabans and Urban Meyers of the world
are good player developers on top of being ridiculous recruiters.
I do think, by virtue of our past two recruiting classes, that we're on the cusp of comparing favorably with Alabama and UF and Texas for the next couple years. But, IMHO, we can't string together consecutive "good" classes while Meyer and Saban consistently bring in classes like they are securing yet again this year.
Let's look at this in another situation for a minute. Why did we beat Oregon in the Rose Bowl (much more convincingly than the score might suggest, by the way)? Perhaps there are a variety of reasons, but to me, it's largely because we had better players. And that can be traced directly back to our recruiting compared to Oregon's. According to Scout, here are how our recruiting classes compare over the past five years (overall class rank / average stars per recruit):
2009: OSU #1 / 3.80; Oregon #26 / 2.92
2008: OSU #4 / 3.90; Oregon #23 / 3.35
2007: OSU #15 / 3.73; Oregon #9 / 3.14 (Oregon had 29 recruits this season, we had 15)
2006: OSU #13 / 3.60; Oregon #52 / 2.70
2005: OSU #7 / 3.72; Oregon #30 / 2.74
Now, these recruiting rankings should be taken with a grain of salt; I strongly agree that if the guys that work for Scout and Rivals were really incredible talent evaluators, they'd be working for Ohio State or Oregon. But, in part, prospect rankings are based upon offer lists, and in any event, these rankings serve as a good, basic barometer for evaluating how well a program is recruiting. The numbers above are probably the #1 reason I was confident we'd beat Oregon going into the Rose Bowl. Simply put, we have routinely signed more talented players than Oregon over the course of the past five years. And that's really, really important, IMO.
So I'm not necessarily disagreeing with anything you're saying, 3074326, but I think it's a mistake to devalue recruiting. It's awfully important, IMO.