Nope. I'm saying that Jason Campbell was the QB Auburn got, not Vince (who would have been wasted in Tuberville and Borges scheme anyway).
Getting an occasional kid from Texas, California, Wisconsin or Idaho doesn't bother me. If you're talking about a strategy of focusing on Texas because that's where these new coaches came from, I'm telling you now that it is a fail.
You can't serve two masters. You can't have your coaches out burning up the desert in Texas hoping to compete with Texas, OU, Tech, A&M, Nebraska, Baylor, SMU, Arkansas, North Texas, TCU, New Mexico, Arizona and the rest and still do an adequate job of maintaining your strengths.
In the end you'll lose on both ends.
The Chiz tried to recruit Texas for Iowa State too. While it will be easier to get a kid to come to Auburn than to an Iowa State type team, you're still looking at a difficult sell. Why? Because mom and dad want to be able to come see their son play and they don't want to have to buy a plane ticket to do so every weekend.
But whatever.
I think Kaos's point is valid. But I do not agree, because I think his analysis is shallow and incomplete.
If I may restate Kaos's point (correct me if I get it wrong, of course): Recruiting TX requires a reallocation of our resources that have traditionally been focused in AL, MS, GA. These traditional efforts have been the genesis of our success and the foundation upon which our program is built. It is inefficient to expend finite resources (time and money) on non-traditional recruiting grounds to the detriment of our efforts in our traditional recruiting grounds. This is the cost/benefit analysis: is the cost of expending our resources in TX going to present enough benefit to counterbalance the reduced resources spent in our traditional recruiting territory (presumably leading to lesser results in this area)?
If that is the sum total of your argument, then I must respectfully disagree and suggest that there is another analysis at play. The cost/benefit analysis is important, but there is also the risk/reward analysis to consider. The cost/benefit assumes that the value of the top recruits in AL, MS, GA is equal to or greater than the value of the top recruits in TX. I submit that it is not. The top TX recruits are generally rated much higher than the top AL recruits. Therefore, if we spend some resources in TX and snag one or two of their top recruits, this is, qualitatively, better than snagging the top one or two recruits in AL, MS or GA. The risk of not wasting time/money in TX is, in my opinion, outweighed by the reward potential in signing those kids.
I have intentionally left FL out of this analysis because, until recently (the Tuberville area) this pipeline has been sporadic and unreliable. Tuberville, due to his time coaching in SoFL, and his staff built a very nice pipeline to that area, but I do not know if these relationships will be maintained under the new staff. I hope that they are, FL is a very fertile recruiting ground, of course, but due to the uncertainty of the HS coaches' reception of the new staff at AU, I felt it prudent to exclude FL from the discussion.
This is my long winded way of saying, I am happy that our staff is recruiting TX.
172 Replies
48473 Views