Recruiting thoughts?

[DallasUte]

Pace gets a lot of heat from the board but he does have a fair point on the need to improve recruiting.  

Pace – wondering what your honest thoughts are, given the latest developments…

[ThurstonW]

Pace is busy….eating a second helping of crow!

[sweetgrass]

oh dear god, that’s like saying Utah would be more successful if they won more.

[Stone]

Exactly!

[EagleMountainUte]

Pace is troll. His point is an obvious one. His implications are that Coach Whitt doesn’t try to improve recruiting. 

[Tednab]

Well if you’re considering just stars and rankings as a measure .. currently Utah is 4th in the pac for avg star rankings

[Utahute72]

No he doesn’t have a point. Since the time Utah has entered the PAC 12 the level of commit has grown exponentially and each of the last classes pushing the levels higher. This year’s class will be the highest rated one ever and with the results of this year on the field it should be even better next year. We also have to realize the it will be a long hard slog to beat the entrenched blue bloods. Really only Oregon, with all of Uncle Phil’s money had been able to dramatically push their recruiting and they still aren’t at the level of an OSU or Alabama, or even Michigan. Utah is improving, but it won’t happen overhight. The one area we do need to do better is the Oline. It was painfully obvious in the championship game that was the one area we are weakest. Harding does a good job in my mind, be he’s working with 3 star level talent, not 4 or 5 star. Utah gets one of those unicorns every 3-4 years, we need to get 1-2 a year.

ESPN had an interesting discussion about that on their recruitment special. This was noted as a problem for the whole PAC 12, not just Utah. The feeling was that most of the quality big uglies come from the south and they simply don’t leave the area. I’ve only seen Stanford or USC pull one of those out west and that occurs very rarely. So we end up canabalizing ourselves fighting for those guys.

[Trailgoat]

Agree. This was a huge recruiting break through year for Utah. Kids and parents are recognizing the stability, integrity, high character, strong work ethic, oh…and commitment to schoolastics Utah offers. Coaches get a lot of recruiting credit, but the players in the system and graduated from Utah make a huge impact. This is Utah’s brand.

Portal and Grad Transfer program is a game changer for programs like Utah. Go Utes!

[Central Coast Ute]

It’s funny you say that. Normally it is true that Utah takes 4 or 5 JC guys. This year they took one grad transfer and the rest were all high school kids. Granted, we might see more in the coming months but this year seems to be way different than years past.

[Utesbyfive]

With Phillips signing, our class moves to 36th nationally, up from 42nd last year. Our average player rank is 86.98, which is good for fourth or fifth best in the PAC.

Every indicator is up. Pace needs to give it a rest for a while.

[DallasUte]

To be clear, I don’t agree with perpetually riding the negativity train.  For me it is a question of moving from scrappy underdog to regional/national powerhouse.  It has been discussed as nauseum that Whit is a great motivator for the underdogs, which probably correlates somewhat to his success in developping underrecruited players, but we would hope to see a shift towards “expecting to win” both on the field and in recruiting battles.

This year, it looks we have turned a corner on both which is fantastic.  We are on a very positive trajectory.

[Dwight89]

The sad truth is no Pac 12 team has won the Pac 12 championship that hasn’t had a four year average top 25 recruiting ranking. This year Utah almost upended that statistic. Unfortuantely almost doesn’t count in football. 

While everyone wants to rail on Pace….in this regard he is 100% correct. If we want to win the Pac 12 we have to recruit better, even better than this year. Period. Stop. 

We are making progress. But heck, this is our best recruiting class ever by average star ranking, and yet even in that regard we are only 5th in the Pac 12, and honestly there is still an ocean of difference between Utah and Oregon/Washington. As long as Whitt/Scalley keep making improvements I’m not going to complain. But the brutal facts are what they are. 

[Stone]

Look, pretty much EVERYONE wants Utah to continually sign better recruits. We all want each recruiting class to be better than the last. That is undisputed. The people that rail on Pace do not do so because they think recruiting is unimportant. We do it because he is a broken-record of stating the obvious and acts as if it is simply a matter of flipping a switch or informing the coaching staff that they should recruit higher-ranked players. The coaching staff is not a bunch of louses that ignore 5* and 4* players… they try for those players… but they are also realists and pragmatic in spending their time and efforts going after recruits where the odds of signing the recruits are high.

That is, it is not smart to sink all efforts into a 5* guy that is starry-eyed on Clemson, Bama, LSU, etc. and then miss out completely on not only that recruit, but also the next guy down that you failed to adequately recruit because you were so focused on the 5* guy. Utah’s recruiting is improving, but Utah’s coaches need to be strategic in who they focus on and pursue, finding solid under-the-radar guys, while also targeting top recruits that are open to playing for a non-traditional power. 

[UtahFanSir]

Spot on. And I liked your post above about 5* recruits…tongue in check.

[Dwight89]

Yeah i don’t disagree with anything in your post. I also think its folly to think/expect any coach to go from recruiting a 30-40 class to a top 10 class overnight, especially at a school like Utah. The more likely scenario is a slow build up over time, which is exactly what Whitt and co have been doing. 

 

What’s frustrating and hard, as a fan, is that our current successes still probably aren’t enough to win us a championship. But, as long as we keep improving I like our chances down the line. 

[Utahute72]

And remember that doesn’t count returning missionaries or the transfer. Utah will sign 2-3 missionaries that will count in this class and that could push the class even higher.

[PhillyUte]

This keeps getting repeated but this isn’t true. You can’t count the recruit twice for your class.

[Charlie]

The next step was to get a good amount of the top local talent. After that, continue the same while making better inroads into Texas, California and Hawaii. All of the top 25 have been at it a very long time, only Mississippi State at 25 came from anywhere like where Utah came from. If it was easy, there would be several new comers every year. Still, no reason we don’t try very hard to break into the top 25. For now, this is good news.

[Author]

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