College Football Recruiting
College football recruiting is a curious affair. For college football fans, it generates plenty of excitement during the offseason, and numerous websites and publications are devoted to covering the matter. NCAA football is big business, after all!
Mack Brown, UT's football coach, has arguably been the most successful recruiter since 1999, with his classes being "ranked" first or near the top in virtually every publication devoted to topic. This year looks like no exception. But despite "outrecruiting" every program in the country since he's been at Texas, Brown's record is only 38-13. That's an excellent record that would please most college football programs, but given that most authorities agree Brown has recruited the best talent in the country, the record indicates he's lost a lot of games he should have won. I would guess if someone went back and looked at the losses, at least half would be games his team was favored to win -- but I'm too lazy to do that right now.
Mack Brown is beginning to acquire an image of a coach who just can't quite take it to the next level. His highly-talented teams at the end of his time at North Carolina never could quite get there, although he did have the drawback of running a football program at a basketball school. Of course, Steve Spurrier (whose record at Florida was 122-27) had that problem at Duke also, but still managed to beat Brown's North Carolina team, which is partly responsible for Spurrier's "Mr. Football" references to Brown. The point is, it's probably fair to question why Mack Brown's Texas teams haven't fared as well as the talent level suggests they should.
But it's possible that the various recruiting analysts aren't perfect at judging talent. I recall that in the mid/late 1990s, Kansas State rarely had a highly regarded (top-20) recruiting class, yet saw phenomenal success on the field, and had athletes who obviously could make plays in a tough football conference. Bill Snyder is a great coach, but he wasn't winning with a bunch of untalented walk-ons he pulled out of the band. Likewise, Oklahoma's 1999 recruiting class was ranked 36th, yet a fair number of members of that class led Oklahoma to its (unlikely) National Championship to cap off the 2000 season. I certainly wouldn't trade Bob Stoops (31-7 after taking over an OU program in disarray) for ten Mack Browns (or one), but are he and Snyder that much better coaches than Brown, that they can turn average talent into legitimate contenders for national championships?
The truth is probably that recruiting "rankings" do reflect a bias in favor of teams that are current powerhouses. When several highly ranked schools pursue a recruit, it puts him on the radar of recruiting services, who may then inch him up to "blue chip" status. But when K-State visits an unknown athlete in the Oklahoma panhandle, figures he fits their offensive or defensive schemes nicely, and keeps quiet about it, that recruit may rank as a "one-star" recruit, which does nothing for the school's overall "ranking" but may turn out to be an important contribution to their team.
Of course, none of that really explains why Mack Brown's Texas teams seem to underperform. But that's a problem for UT fans.
[Posted at 17:23 CST on 02/03/02] [Link]
