Quote Originally Posted by Todd4State View Post
The thing is a lot of Mississippi players are raw. But with coaching in college they can become really good players. MSU has a long history of overlooking talented players from Mississippi- Rice, Payton, Favre- those are players that could have changed the complete perception of our program entirely. We don't find those players if we're chasing some three star from Florida and try to pretend that's the equivalent of a four star from Mississippi. We've been better lately- see Chris Jones. He and guys like Benardrick McKinney are probably at USM 20 years ago.

Honestly, I would prefer to build a program with Mississippians and then any out of state four star player we can get. It seems like the out of state guys we get for the most part are just as raw and rarely pan out as much.

After Leach I would like to see us get away from a "system coach" and hire someone more like a Shane Beamer that can recruit really well and clean out the state and has a scheme that is pretty basic and simple and flexible so that we don't have to tell Gardner Minchew to go to Wazzu because he doesn't fit our spread option scheme. Find the best players and fit the scheme around them.
I get your thought here and I want to recruit MS hard. We have to.

But here's what I will say. Everyone uses the example of Favre, Payton, and Rice. Do we have have any examples over the last 20-25 years of overlooked guys that made an impact in the league from MS that's anywhere close to the impact they made? Certainly we've had some make a huge impact for us. McKinney is a big one.

I struggle to find someone using modern day scouting and evaluation that just gets overlooked. Chris Jones is the closest comparison, but he was a 5 star by the time his recruitment ended.

I want in state 4 star guys. They pan out a good percent of the time. But we aren't talking about not taking MS 4 stars for out of state 3 stars. I'm talking about spots 15-25 of a class. Are we really getting the bang for our time and efforts out of the MS guys that are the last 7-10 guys of a class? Go back and look over the last decade and you will see a lot of not great both at MSU and other schools.

The Top 25 in Mississippi every year doesn't have 25 SEC caliber players. The Top 25 in AL, TX, TN, FL, GA, and LA does. We've got to dig into the depths of other states. There's a reason other decent schools aren't coming into MS and taking players outside the Top 15 in the state. Lowest ranked MS player taken by a good out of state SEC school in 2022 was ranked 13. Lowest ranked AL player taken by a good out of state SEC school in 2022 was at 42.

We've got to go out of state to fill out more of class. Can't abandon MS completely, but the data has always shown the state of MS can't support the talent for 2 SEC teams to be competitive year in and year out.