You make alot of good points on this board, but I think we will have to agree to disagree on this one. Success on paper is different than success on the field. What you propose would be equal to me walking into a casino with $50 and proclaiming success before I put the first $1 bill into a machine. I mean, I haven't won anything. I didn't lose anything. But I didn't do anything either.
Wes is right, some of those posts were exactly my point. Even though Georgia has had a down year here or there, it doesn't mean they didn't recruit good. It mean they didn't coach them well, they didn't scheme well on the field, or they were unlucky with injuries and a few guys not living up to their billing. But on signing day, their "billing" was that they were top notch players....agreed on by everyone.
RWS, the following quote by you explains my point...
Success on paper is different than success on the field.
You are exactly right. Signing day and recruiting for that year is done on paper. It's not done on the field. Your job in recruiting is to take the available players, go with the odds, and reel in as many top notch (based on the information available at the time) guys as you can. Your goal is to get them to sign....on paper. You are either successful at
that job (attaining signatures) or you are not.
Later, comes the "on the field" work with these new guys. At that time, you either learn that they fall short of what they were labeled, or they get hurt, or they fail out, or you simply can't coach them, or you simply can't prepare them properly for a game, or they are as good as advertised, or you can prepare them for a game, and you can coach them up for SEC play. All of this determines on the field success.
They are two different things. You can be a great recruiter (Ron Zook) and suck as a coach. Zook going 8-5 every year never changed the fact that he was successful as a recruiter. Not even a little. It meant he couldn't coach. Did 8-5 in 2003 for Zook mean that Spurrier recruited shitty players in 1999 and 2000? No, it means Zook couldn't coach.
The battle of recruiting is only won in February.
Let me give one more analogy. Let's say you had $100,000, and you had to put $50,000 on two different teams to win the World Series next year. You had to pick two,
before the season. What would you do? You would inspect the rosters. Look at the managers records. Check the schedules. Look at Vegas and check the odds (this would probably be the biggest one). Right now, on Vegas.com, you'd find that the Yankees are 14/5 favorites and the Red Sox are 11/2.
So you go, place you money on those two teams. At that point, before the action is played out on the field, you have made good choices. You did all you could do, went with the odds, gave yourself the
best chance to win. You made good choices. You made wise choices. At that point, having done all you could do, you had a successful process that led you to the best choice. (the opposite would have been saying "I sure love the uniforms of the Kansas City Royals...I think I'll go with them". Then you find out their odds are 150/1. You would have had an unsuccessful process of picking your team, as you did not give yourself the best chance to succeed).
Come October, you'll find out if those teams let you down or not. You'll find out if they lived up to expectations or if they didn't. But you cannot judge
retrospectively the wisdom of the decision you made prior to the season. You
still made the right call.
You still made the correct and best choices. October doesn't change the success or quality of those choices made in March.
Even if Dyer rushes for 187 yards in his whole career at Auburn....it was still the right thing to do
in the fall of 2009 to go after him. Eric Mack may be a back-up for 4 years. It was still the right thing to persuade him to come to Auburn early in 2010. Those battles can only be fought once....on paper...during recruiting.
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