by Jeremy Wahman
Recruiting in college football is a funny game. There are multiple expected commits/decommits, transfers and those pesky recruiting rankings you can find everywhere. There is one set of rankings for everything. I am writing this blog today CardNation because you have inspired me. You have inspired me to tell you, much as Justin told the uk fans last night. to calm down. I seen one tweet saying uk was killing us on the recruiting trail. I seen one who was actually complaining about the talent Strong had brought in. It’s really ridiculous.
You guys know me well enough to know that I try not to bring Kentucky into anything I do because of the respect I have for a handful of my uk fan friends. Even despite the ignorance from them that I see daily I never fall for it because of the respect. But I am gonna use Kentucky as an example, not in a negative way, to explain why stoops is not “killing ” us and why recruiting rankings can be deceiving. In the 2013 class Kentucky signed 24 kids according to ESPN article I’m looking at. UL only signed 17. How many of you all out there can see that 24 is greater than 17? If the kids are close to being 3* or average that Kentucky would have a better class quantity wise. Florida signed 30 kids….how did that work out? All I’m saying is that when you have 30 available slots you will fill them up regardless, you had more to fill. Stanford signed 12 kids this year, they played in a BCS bowl last year. UL had almost half of what Florida had to offer scholarship wise and therefore would have a better class on the average.
The point of this story is to educate and with that being said I must inform you that we don’t have as many open slots to recruit with. We also don’t have playing time to offer these kids. These kids aren’t going elsewhere because these places are better, it’s because the other places have playing time. Just remember before you stoop (non-intentional ,i swear) to other schools fans levels and berate your coaches during the greatest athletic school year in NCAA history, remember there are all sorts of variables that go into these rankings and why recruits choose other schools. It not always clear-cut as we are better than you because we signed 30 and you signed 12. Just remember recruiting can be deceiving…
P.S. If he’s smiling, we are all in good shape.
