OregonBuckeye;1433735; said:
I'm not talking historically. I'm talking about this past decade. NIU has gone to bowls and been a consistently solid MAC team. They've also probably sent more impact players to the NFL than Illinois has.
Sadly, this is correct. Sadly, under Joe Novak, NIU had a better eye for Chicago talent than Ron Turner or Lou Tepper did. Of course, that's not saying much. As I've said in this thread several times, if you ranked every Big Ten football coach in the last 20 years on "importance of recruiting in their coaching philosophy", Ron Turner would finish second to last and Lou Tepper would finish last. Both believe that their systems transcended talent. Both were horribly, horribly wrong. The only good years we had in their regimes was when we actually had some NFL talent on Tepper's D (Simeon Rice, Kevin Hardy, John Holocek, Dana Howard) and Turner's O (Kurt Kittner throwing to Brandon Lloyd, Greg Lewis, Walter Young, and Aaron Morehead).
This is perfectly exemplified by this stat...
NFL first round draft picks from the University of Illinois
Mackovic recruits:
Scott Davis (Raiders 1st round pick 1989)
Jeff George (Colts, 1st overall, 1990)
Henry Jones (Bills 1st round pick, 1991)
Brad Hopkins (Oilers 1st round pick, 1993)
Tepper recruits:
Simeon Rice (Arizona 1st round pick, 1996)
Kevin Hardy (Jacksonville 1st round pick, 1996)
Turner recruits:
(this space intentionally left blank)
15 years of the Tepper and Turner regimes... 2 NFL first rounders (and only 26 draft picks total). There are probably half a dozen MAC teams that can boast better numbers than that.
I'll put that another way. In 8 years of recruited players, Ron Turner sent 14 of them to the NFL draft. In the 2004 NFL draft alone, you guys sent 14.
Which is why I'm excited that Ron Zook is bringing in blue-chippers. Which is why I think our trajectory points upwards next year and beyond. Which is why I'm posting in the thread about Zook's recruiting.
Thanks. That was cathartic.