Doogie: Juco transfers key to fixing Gophers backfield, secondary

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Actually, there is a good chance Troy Stoudermire will be back next year.
 

Not a bad article. It's kind of bizarre in that I thought (I could be wrong) but Doogie was one of the people who ripped on Brew for bringing in JuCo players. Like I said, I could be wrong on that.

The other thing that's odd is just how near-sighted this town is. Doogie makes reference to it being a long time since a Vikes playoff run, well less than 2 years ago the Vikes had in their deepest run in my lifetime (tied with a couple other years).

Other than those two picky areas, it's an interesting article.
 

Devon Wright or Donnell Kirkwoodland will be the #1 guy next year IMVHO
 

Bob_Loblaw said:
The other thing that's odd is just how near-sighted this town is. Doogie makes reference to it being a long time since a Vikes playoff run, well less than 2 years ago the Vikes had in their deepest run in my lifetime (tied with a couple other years).

Other than those two picky areas, it's an interesting article.
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Haha, I was gonna post that too. 2 years ago isn't that distant of a memory IMO, but hey to each his own lol.
 


I think the criticism of Brewster with regards to JUCOs was not that he recruited JUCOs, but that he brought in a lot of them and with mixed results. Kill brought in 3 this fall and they've all played with Moulton and Rabe getting lots of snaps. Too bad Drayquan Crawford didn't qualify. He might have helped us.
 


Monty519 said:
Haha, I was gonna post that too. 2 years ago isn't that distant of a memory IMO, but hey to each his own lol.
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Yeah, I don't know why this town is so strange with that kind of stuff. Our sports writers certainly take on the persona of Eyore when things are going great. I've honestly heard/read many times sports people in this town talk about the last 10 years of Gopher football like we've been absolutely horrendous the entire time. I remember hearing Sludge talking a couple of weeks ago (he was a U of MN student from like 98 to 03) that there is literally no reason for kids to go to games then....we had a decent little run while he was at school.

We've been bad 3 years, slightly below mediocore a handful of years and slightly above mediocore probably a smaller handful of years. It's not prestigous or elite, but certainly not as bad as the average mn sports fan might think.
 

gophmeister said:
Too bad Drayquan Crawford didn't qualify. He might have helped us.
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Dre Crawford ended up at UNLV and hasn't even seen the field for a very very bad team. I guess he could possibly be redshirting, but that is atypical for JuCos. At any rate, the evidence would seem to suggest that him not qualifying was a blessing in disguise.
 



dpodoll68 said:
Dre Crawford ended up at UNLV and hasn't even seen the field for a very very bad team. I guess he could possibly be redshirting, but that is atypical for JuCos. At any rate, the evidence would seem to suggest that him not qualifying was a blessing in disguise.
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Ah touche.
 

gophmeister said:
I think the criticism of Brewster with regards to JUCOs was not that he recruited JUCOs, but that he brought in a lot of them and with mixed results. Kill brought in 3 this fall and they've all played with Moulton and Rabe getting lots of snaps. Too bad Drayquan Crawford didn't qualify. He might have helped us.
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Brew's JuCos were pretty succesful too.
Lawrence, Simmons, Brock, Small, McKinley, Wills were all succesful here. He definitely had some flops, Hayo, Pittman and Sharpe, but that's just going to happen in recruiting.

His track record with JuCo's was probably better than his track record with highschool recruits.
 

I don't know why so many people are against JUCO's. Sure, you don't want to build a program with them. That's a no-brainer.

But the defense has some serious holes next year, particularly at DB and DT. If they bring in 6 and hit on 2 or 3 of them, they're a lot better off.

The ideal situation is that some of the current guys really step up between now and next fall; Manuel, Wells, Levine, Thompson, even Vereen, et al.

Like I said, for what is generally just a 2-yr commitment by the program to these guys, they don't have to strike gold on all of them. Hitting on a few of them would make a huge difference next year for a program that will have depth issues at a few positions.
 

No one is against the current coach bringing in JUCOs until he's the ex-coach who brought in too many JUCOs.
 



Bob_Loblaw said:
Not a bad article. It's kind of bizarre in that I thought (I could be wrong) but Doogie was one of the people who ripped on Brew for bringing in JuCo players. Like I said, I could be wrong on that.
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I do remember him calling McKinley a "Mental midget" while writing for Rivals.
 

Kill already said the team is slow and not very deep. JUCO's are a good way to improve in areas like our secondary. Some good JUCO CB's out there which we need. I don't really think Doogie was negative on JUCO players.
 

I don't mind a few JUCOs for some needed depth, but someone please explain to me how our team will be better off for the long run if we are starting 3 JUCOs in the defensive backfield next year? Isn't the point to build the program so that we are competing and in the top tier of the Big Ten in 3-4 years? I don't know how this happens if we start 3 JUCOs in years 2&3, and are starting an entire new set of DB's in year 4. That's what happened under Brewster, where our defense was ok in years 2 and 3 and had a huge drop-off in year 4.
 

The JuCo route won't go well if you can't develop the young players in the mean time. However, assuming you trust Kill's ability to develop players, it really comes down to the ability to develop players, if you can't do it, whether or not you have JuCo players, you will never be decent.

However, lets assume we bring in 3 JuCo DBs...in 2 seasons, our defensive backfield will actually have some nice upperclassmen depth (Montgomery, Wells, Levine, Murray, Moss, Wells, Thompson).

We need to keep in mind that our secondary is SO thin, that we could add 3 DBs and still have a ton of PT to go around for our non-RSing young DBs.

As far as the drop off after Brew's year #3...I think a lot of that had to do with his inability to develop players...
-Michael Carter wasn't able to step up and take over for Simmons/Sherels.
-Royston got hurt.
-Dandridge got kicked off the team, he likely would have pushed Theret for a spot. If not, he would have added depth

Our problem with our defense in 2010 (after the JuCo kids were gone) was that because of attrition and other issues, we were forced to play 2 true freshman all the time (Manuel and Vereen).
 

Another reason for bringing in JuCos

Right now the number of scholarships we have for each class are out of balance. By bringing in JuCos Kill can smooth out the number of scholarships that each class will have in the future.
 

Good points Bob. I guess I can see bringing in that many JUCOs IF the coaching staff is confident that the young guys have the ability to develop into good Big Ten players and the JUCOs provide a short-term transition. My fear is that by signing 3 JUCOs, we potentially take away 3 scholarships from high school DBs. That's what I don't want to see happen if there are legitimate questions about how good the current freshmen/high school seniors can be.

I agree that the drop-off in Brewster's year 4 was somewhat based on his inability to develop talent, but all coaches will have some players that don't live up to expectations. It was magnified in Brewster's case because he took so many JUCOs he was left with no margin of error with the high school recruits he brought in.
 

John Galt said:
My fear is that by signing 3 JUCOs, we potentially take away 3 scholarships from high school DBs.
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That won't happen with the current makeup of the roster. If you manage to keep your attrition low, it is impossible to bring in a full class every year. We have an abnormally low number of upperclassmen on the squad, and adding productive players who only have two years of eligibility will balance things out and allow us to continue to bring in 20-22 scholarship players per year over the next few years. If we loaded up with 25-28 HS players this year, that would only serve to diminish the number of players we could bring in for 2013 and 2014. And, as Bob said, the players who would've played without any JuCos will still play a ton - they will just have better competition (at least in theory) pushing them for PT and helping to bridge the gap until they are ready to be leaders on this team.
 

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