What do you mean? What bait?
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He's good. He's deceptively quick on his second and third step. He uses his length well. He's got good ability to use his hands and get off of blocks. My biggest issue with him is he plays "high". He naturally get high in his stance and it causes him to lose some quickness and agility in the backfield. But he's got a motor to chase down some of those plays.
Any negatives I saw can be corrected. If he can get rid of getting high, he can massively improve his leverage at the line and get that first step burst to get faster.
I'm curious to see if that changes under Leach. I think a lot of that was Dan's fault. He didn't recruit hard enough to get very many of the non-diamonds in the rough and even worse he didn't beat the big names enough. If he had beaten Alabama even once to go along with a 9 win regular season with an Egg Bowl win I think the blue-chip recruits would start to buy into the MSU brand a little more. Of course, we prided ourselves on developing diamonds in the rough and while I think that's a good thing I'm sure the bluebloods used that against us some- "You're not a diamond the rough. Come to Alabama, LSU, Georgia, or wherever and play with the other bluechips like you."
What's anyone's opinion on Howard? He's got a really low ranking. He committed to Joe's staff didn't he? Is he the typical underrated MS kid who is actually a baller, is he a good fit for this scheme, could we possibly find someone a little more talented than him or are we even actively recruiting many RB's? Just haven't seen a ton on RB recruiting. It'd be a sticky situation to drop a Starkville kid but is he talented enough to be the only RB we sign if we are just signing 1 or is this a 2 RB class?
I think it's overblown if we're getting half of the top 5. Of course I'd love to get all the best players but that don't mean it's embarrassing if we don't get #1 if we're getting 2, 4, & 5. I don't expect you to agree & that's cool. You've been beating this #1 player drum for a while.
The reality is we're going to have to start beating people like Alabama, LSU, and Georgia some like I said for us to start pulling those players even more consistently than we are. When Jackie did that we started to pull players like Dontae Walker and Jerious Norwood.
That's why we pull top players in state in baseball. We've shown that we can beat top teams consistently and get to Omaha. I think a lot of players in Mississippi want to play for their state- but they also want to compete for championships too. Some still come to MSU anyway of course.
If Leach can beat Alabama 20% of the time we will start pulling the best players.
That's interesting. I bet Georgia has a lot more competition for in state players compared to us though. Tennessee, Alabama, Auburn, Clemson, and South Carolina are relying a lot on Georgia talent I would imagine. And probably a little bit from Florida State and Florida too. Also, I think Georgia Tech hasn't been as much of a factor just because of the type of scheme that they ran under Paul Johnson and I'm sure that has greatly affected their recruiting across the board.