Does our complete lack of talent show Rivals to be as big a fraud as many have said?

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Sparlimb

Sparlimb

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Brew had a top 25 class with most of these upperclassmen. What a joke. That class rank was completely contrived by a site wishing to help out an old buddy and his new program. That's why I quit subscribing to that rag.
 

Now this is something I can agree with you on. It also could have been his coaching ability. But I'm baffled at where these great recruiting classes went
 

Dumb statements by you two. The best programs have got the best recruits. IT JUST TAKES A GOOD COACH. Brewster couldn't get anything out of the talent. If the SEC didn't have high rated recruits you would have a point.
 

From that class you are talking about, Brock and Simmons are in the NFL and Simoni Lawrence has been. It takes more than one class to build a program and that class lost some talent (Maresh and Smith come immediately to mind). Unless you are insinuating that Rivals fakes offers from other schools, the Gophers brought in a lot of highly regarded kids that year. It's a joke to look at 2 years of highly regarded recruiting classes and declare them worthless because the team still sucks. One major area where Brewster failed was that he did not ever get a big time RB on campus. We have not had recruited a big time RB since Maroney and as a result we haven't seen any explosive plays out of the run game. LaMichael James, Josh Huff, and Hassan Lipscomb, etc, etc. The RB's we have brought in don't seem to be anything other than ordinary and you can usually tell pretty quickly if a guy is going to be a gamebreaker. On defense the biggest issue is the pass rush and that's been the biggest issue since Lamenzar Williams left campus. Brewster brought in some higly regarded DT types, but his DE's (Garin, possibly Hageman, Wilhite) have not panned out at all.
 

EG#9 said:
From that class you are talking about, Brock and Simmons are in the NFL and Simoni Lawrence has been. It takes more than one class to build a program and that class lost some talent (Maresh and Smith come immediately to mind). Unless you are insinuating that Rivals fakes offers from other schools, the Gophers brought in a lot of highly regarded kids that year. It's a joke to look at 2 years of highly regarded recruiting classes and declare them worthless because the team still sucks. One major area where Brewster failed was that he did not ever get a big time RB on campus. We have not had recruited a big time RB since Maroney and as a result we haven't seen any explosive plays out of the run game. LaMichael James, Josh Huff, and Hassan Lipscomb, etc, etc. The RB's we have brought in don't seem to be anything other than ordinary and you can usually tell pretty quickly if a guy is going to be a gamebreaker. On defense the biggest issue is the pass rush and that's been the biggest issue since Lamenzar Williams left campus. Brewster brought in some higly regarded DT types, but his DE's (Garin, possibly Hageman, Wilhite) have not panned out at all.
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Lipscomb commited here and then was ruled ineligible i thought?
 


I think half of that 2008 recruiting class isn't even here anymore. If Rivals were to re-rate the 2008 classes, we would not be #18.
 

I thought about that 2008/09 recruiting classes knowing that they were fairly well regarded at the time. Many of the higher ranked recruits are no longer with the team or did not qualify (i.e. Maresh, Lipscomb, etc.). The program rose from obscurity to one with an occasional 8 to 10 win season. Quite frankly, I miss those days and see little possibility that we will find ourselves there any time soon. We may have had only decent classes between 1999 and 2005, but the mid-ranked recruits didn't see the field until their Jr or Sr seasons. Lower attrition rates, extension of the season by a month w/ bowl games, and physical development of previous classes meant we had stronger depth charts. The "Culture" within the program was far healthier to boot. In my opinion, the program was markedly better than many (media included) gave it credit for. By November of 2005, Mason had trailing 50 and 100 game winning percentages of almost 66% and 56%, respectively [trailing 20 game win pct of 80% (10/9/04) and 30 game win pct of 73% (10/22/04 & 9/2/05)]. If our alumni, University community, and general populous were as supportive of our program as NDSU is of theirs, we may have had fewer empty seats viewed by potential recruits. To place this in perspective: In the Fall of '99, we beat #2 Penn State on the road while NDSU had a hard fought victory over St. Cloud State by three points earlier that season. By 2005, we went into Happy Valley ranked #18 with a target on our backs and had beaten Ohio State, Oregon, and Alabama in the interim.

Good seasons are the product of building efforts and start with beating teams that we should beat. I was not sure about the Kill hire until I learned more about his staff and caught news clips of his speaking engagements. By this point, I expected stronger fundamentals, fewer penalties, and better personnel changes.
 

Yes

The proof is in the play of the overstated star levels of the players on the field. *** or **** does not mean heart and effort
to achieve or overcome adversity it just means a spoiled attitude about me first that #6 displayed tonight. He is turning into Edwards
a talented guy who bailed on his teammates and let them down.
 

EG#9 said:
From that class you are talking about, Brock and Simmons are in the NFL and Simoni Lawrence has been. It takes more than one class to build a program and that class lost some talent (Maresh and Smith come immediately to mind). Unless you are insinuating that Rivals fakes offers from other schools, the Gophers brought in a lot of highly regarded kids that year. It's a joke to look at 2 years of highly regarded recruiting classes and declare them worthless because the team still sucks. One major area where Brewster failed was that he did not ever get a big time RB on campus. We have not had recruited a big time RB since Maroney and as a result we haven't seen any explosive plays out of the run game. LaMichael James, Josh Huff, and Hassan Lipscomb, etc, etc. The RB's we have brought in don't seem to be anything other than ordinary and you can usually tell pretty quickly if a guy is going to be a gamebreaker. On defense the biggest issue is the pass rush and that's been the biggest issue since Lamenzar Williams left campus. Brewster brought in some higly regarded DT types, but his DE's (Garin, possibly Hageman, Wilhite) have not panned out at all.
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In retrospect, I'd say you are right EG#9. It does often take more than one class and it definately takes coaching. We have lost a number of kids from the class as well (remember how pumped we were when Maresh committed). Maybe its because Brewster was supposed to be such a recruiter and I paid more attention to recruiting, but it sure seems like a number of top guys never made much of their careers. Although I suppose there were as many under Mason. Anyway, I guess my whole point was that I was hoping we'd be able to get a staff who could coach the talent I was hoping we had. Since that doesn't seem to be working, it looks like we will be waiting a year or two until Kill gets some of his own classes in to see what can be done.
 



Brewster's improved Rivals ratings didn't produce an Eslinger, Setterstrom, Utecht, Spaeth, Decker, Barber, or even a Vandesteeg or Weber. Those guys looked like duds coming in compared to this year's senior class.
 

I think three things are in play here. First, maybe the class was overrated a little. Second, a lot of that class is no longer here. And third (perhaps most importantly) these guys have not been coached well or consistently the last 3 years. The coaching job of Kill's staff is going to take time.

What concerns me more than the lack of talent and lack of wins so far is the seeming lack of fight in our team. Do the players care? Who is going to step up to lead this team? Very concerning.
 

Rivals and Scout are in the business of making money. Before they were around we never heard the term soft verbal and definitely never heard of the made up term silent verbal. They charge for information about 16 year olds.
 

I blame Rivals. (and Scout, and ESPN)

Ok, hear me out.

So, Glen Mason comes to Minnesota, gets a lot of kids from the immediate area surrounding the state and Ohio. Many of those kids are 2 star rated by the recruiting agencies.

Mason is seen as a good coach getting mediocre athletes to bowl games somewhat consistently.

Tim Brewster comes in and improves the recruiting in the eyes of the rating agencies. Many of those kids are from out-of-state, Texas, Florida, etc. Brew, knowing he's a "recruiting stud" relies on Rivals ratings and doesn't really do much evaluation of his own. 2
star athletes Mason would have relied on fall through the cracks and get offers at places like NDSU, SDSU, and Duluth.

Brewster does worse than Mason and gets beat by smaller, midwestern schools. NDSU becomes formidable, Duluth wins a D-2 title.

This year, we see our defensive line get manhandled by an FCS school with a ton of Minnesota athletes on the roster.

Rivals ratings made Brewster and staff lazy. Relying on these ratings rather than a legitimate evaluation from coaches had us
bringing in what we believed to be superior athletes when as-good, if not better kids were simply ignored by the recruiting websites in our own backyard.

Basically, the disrespect for football played outside of Texas, Florida, and Pennsylvania is something we bought into as a program
once Mason left and now we're paying the price. Rivals gets to see all those athletes play, gets them a star-rating, and the coaches eat it up. Meanwhile, Brock Jensen, a recruit that Rivals didn't even have a picture of goes 16 of 21 against our Big Ten Gophers as a RS Sophomore.

Last year's NDSU recruiting class had 6 Rivals rated athletes, all of them were 2 star caliber.

Bottom line is this: Mason had better athletes than we thought and Brewsters "talent" wasn't what it was billed to be. Now, Kill is left installing a new system with athletes even worse than when Brewster tried to install the spread when he first got here.
 



Like it or not, the "stars" that recruits get are a good general way of evaluating talent and the potential impact of those recruits.

It isn't a coincidence that the schools who consistently pull in top 25 recruiting classes are always among the best in the nation.

Of course there are exceptions but this shouldn't be treated as an exact science, more of a guideline.
 

I can't imagine college coaches rely on "Rivals." According to Don Landholm, assistant defensive coordinator out of Purdue, he says every college school pays for outside sources to give them their talent evaluation. He claimed he had never heard of rivals when I talked to him.
 

The problem with Brewster's recruiting classes wasn't so much talent level, it was that too many of them washed out, the attrition level was much too high. Perhaps the ratings agencies should make some accommodations for kids being able to stay out of trouble and make it to class.
 

Former Goofer said:
Like it or not, the "stars" that recruits get are a good general way of evaluating talent and the potential impact of those recruits.

It isn't a coincidence that the schools who consistently pull in top 25 recruiting classes are always among the best in the nation.

Of course there are exceptions but this shouldn't be treated as an exact science, more of a guideline.
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Yeah, I think you missed his entire point. His point, and the point that I made in a different post, is that the recruiting services are blowing smoke up your butt when it comes to upper-midwest kids, severely underrating them.

Did Wisconsin build a possibly title contender this year but getting in super-stud recruits? How about Iowa, did they build their program using super-studs? No. they get nice, solid recruiting classes, using a lot of area kids, and coach up the underrated talent.

That is, I believe, Jerry Kill's plan, as hard as the first 4 games have been to watch. Let's hope it works. We fans deserve a good football program.
 

mkAz said:
The problem with Brewster's recruiting classes wasn't so much talent level, it was that too many of them washed out, the attrition level was much too high. Perhaps the ratings agencies should make some accommodations for kids being able to stay out of trouble and make it to class.
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What would Brewster's "good" class have looked like if Rivals accounted for all the attrition? Instead of 17th, perhaps ~70th? That said, still >> NDSU.
 

cncmin said:
What would Brewster's "good" class have looked like if Rivals accounted for all the attrition? Instead of 17th, perhaps ~70th? That said, still >> NDSU.
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70th maybe, but couple that with 5 systems in 5 years and playing a program with coaching consistancy for some 9 years and then yes NDSU.
 

The team-by-team ratings are completely senseless. I wrote about it at length earlier this year here.

The star system is the best of what we have, but it's inherently flawed because there's no way to accurately gauge how players on the fringes will or won't develop. The tip top recruits almost always pan out in some form, but a large percentage of the three-star guys are a crapshoot.
 


Sparlimb said:
Brew had a top 25 class with most of these upperclassmen. What a joke. That class rank was completely contrived by a site wishing to help out an old buddy and his new program. That's why I quit subscribing to that rag.
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The really sad part about the whole self-reinforcing system is that the "recruitniks", or whatever the religious followers call themselves, will defend the system and the top 25 ranking based on how well the class does in the NFL draft/free agent signings. In other words, if the class has a decent number of drafted or signed players - then the ranking was correct after all.


No one really cares about wins anyway...
 

The problem is that Brewster let Rivals rankings do his recruiting for him. He wasn't recruiting for a system, he was recruiting to get "stars". He let people who have never coached above the high school level do his evaluating for him. Then once he got this mess of "stars" he had no clue what to do with them because very few of them fit his system of the day.
 

cjcarter8 said:
The problem is that Brewster let Rivals rankings do his recruiting for him. He wasn't recruiting for a system, he was recruiting to get "stars". He let people who have never coached above the high school level do his evaluating for him. Then once he got this mess of "stars" he had no clue what to do with them because very few of them fit his system of the day.
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Not to mention, these highly touted "star" players got to Minnesota and realized "what the heck am I doing here?". They realized they had been swindled by a used-car salesman to come to a state that they didn't give a rat's rear end about, to play for a man who very obviously was in over his head.

And the icing on the cake is that players who have stayed to play for the Maroon and Gold (because their own state's schools wouldn't take them) have ended up not being any better than the players from Minn.

Yeah, that strategy seems to have worked out well.
 

I still feel a lot of people are missing the point. The Gophers recruiting classes were ranked 9th- 11th in the Big Ten from 04-07. 4 straight classes of absolutely anemic talent coming in to the program. We have not won more than 3 conference games in a season with players from these classes. There is a much larger sample size of lower ranked recruiting classes failing than higher ranked ones. We've had just two classes that were rated highly and that is not enough to make any sort of a determination on. Also, the jury is still out on a lot of these guys as most kids are not 4 year starters.
 

EG#9 said:
I still feel a lot of people are missing the point. The Gophers recruiting classes were ranked 9th- 11th in the Big Ten from 04-07. 4 straight classes of absolutely anemic talent coming in to the program. We have not won more than 3 conference games in a season with players from these classes. There is a much larger sample size of lower ranked recruiting classes failing than higher ranked ones. We've had just two classes that were rated highly and that is not enough to make any sort of a determination on. Also, the jury is still out on a lot of these guys as most kids are not 4 year starters.
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That's ok. As long as you keep getting guys in NFL camps - you did well in recruiting.

Players don't care about wins in college anyway. Not like they're getting paid, are they?
 

BisonGopher said:
That's ok. As long as you keep getting guys in NFL camps - you did well in recruiting.

Players don't care about wins in college anyway. Not like they're getting paid, are they?
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Are you really this dense?
 


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