Originally Posted by
ShotgunDawg
Todd,
I agree with much of what you said, but wanted to offer a few thoughts.
1. I don't blame the recruiting sites all that much, but we give them way to much influence over how we feel about our class or a player. One of the main problems that these recruiting guys have is lack of staff and travel budget. These recruiting websites don't have massive travel budgets that allow them properly scout an area, and therefore must rely almost solely on grainy video, in which the players play against different levels of competition, measurements, and camps. You can't evaluate makeup, work ethic, football IQ, and leadership ability from a highlight video. I can't blame the recruiting sites for this. The only way it gets better is if they start charging a ton more for memberships, so they can add staff and travel expenses, or their membership enrollment drastically increases.
As I've said before, this is why players from Atlanta and Texas will often times be rated higher than kids from Mississippi. Most of the recruiting gurus live in Atlanta or Texas, understand the local competition level, and don't have to accrue massive travel expenses to see the players live. Therefore, kids from these states have longer track records with the recruiting sites, have been seen live more often, possibly have more money to attend camps, and are playing against known quantities. Furthermore, these player will have more offers because college coaches only have so many days to recruit and evaluate players live. Therefore, they are much more efficient going to heavily populated recruiting grounds that allow them see more prospects, in less days, and for less money. Kids that live in Rosa Fort, Independence, Tylertown, ect. are completely inefficient to see play live, unless they are known quantity. Simply put, most school can't waste a day on a non-sure thing prospect that will probably go to MSU, if offered, anyway.
2. Are Mississippi players really more raw? Seems to me that it didn't take to long for McKinney, Chris Jones, Gabe Jackson, Preston Smith, Market, Calhoun, Justin Malone, Clayborne, and D Williams to make an impact and show that they are good players.
No doubt our coaches are developing talent well, but we knew most of these guys were going to be really good players during their true freshman year or redshirt freshman year. It's really tough for someone to drastically improve from a 2 star to an NFL draft caliber player in 1 year or less.
This may sound cliche, but the more and more I look at what our staff is doing, the more and more I see the similarities to the Oakland A's. Our staff has found an recruiting arbitrage in scouting and acquiring under valued prospects, and they are getting better at it the longer they are running this program and make more connections.
Our staff has found a way to hunt down and properly evaluate the best players in Mississippi, regardless of their star ranking. They are taking high floor/low risk prospects that are ranked low, but would probably be solid 3 stars to mid 4 stars if they were from Georgia or Texas.
Also notice how few of JUCOs we are recruiting now. Why? because Mullen and staff are hitting so much on high school prospects, that there simply aren't many holes on the roster that a JUCO can just come in and start.
Mullen could certainly improve with his gameday coaching, but he is a really good GM. His organization has a wonderful scouting department that finds and properly evaluates undervalued prospects, develops players, and creates a team first attitude organization.
Simply put, as an organization or if we were a business, we are really well ran with the resources we have.