Mix of Blue Chips- SCrooster

So ... the most successful teams in college football history have always had near perfect mixes of blue collar and blue chippers.

Blue-collar over-achievers are oft-times more coveted among D1 big time college coaches that know what they are doing than are unknown, over-rated blue chippers.

Supposedly, it is easier to recruit blue-collar over-achievers en masses when your program is doing very well ... but I've always been of the opinion that it has far more to do with a coach's eye for talent than it does players beating your door down to walk-on at your program - although that certainly helps.

You really want blue-chip skill players - and that's one of the reasons why the recruiting services usually give more points to skill players than they do the big uglies. But if you recruit the big time blue chip skill players, then you can mix and match in the trenches and work the chemistry from the inside out until you tweak-it-up just right.

Skill players play within their own heads. Trenchers have to rely on their buddies next to them and behind them ... both sides of the ball, LBs and DEs included. So you want your real blue-collar over-achievers at LB, Spur, DT and on the OL. You want a real blue collar over achieving Center and and Middle LB if you can find them ... smart players with mean dispositions who know and understand the game.

You gotta find just the right mix. It's not easy. But if you get it right then you know when it happens.

I really like the way SCAR is shaping-up for 2014 but I've seen it coming for a couple of years now so I've been saying since 2012 that 2014 was going to be a big year for SCAR simply because that mix was happening with some true freshmen in 2011 and 2012 while we were bringing-in some good players to fill crucial needs in 2013. This 2014 class will put the final couple two or three pieces in place.

I've always thought Richt recruited too many blue chippers and not enough blue collar.

Saban has it down to a science and his is a methodology that naturally builds good chemistry although I thought this past season, 2013, was the least chemical bunch of the Saban era. But Saban evidently believes some of that had to do with coaching - we'll see.

Dooley was the master. Dooley had the best mix of blue collar and blue chippers I can ever remember. Danny Ford was another guy who used to do it very well. Tom Osborn may have been the best in my lifetime, but it was not unusual for Osborn to turn walk-ons into All-Americans under his system back in the day.

Spurrier does pretty good. I gotta give it to the HBC. He's doing more of it now then he had to do back when he was at UF, although his blue collar guys were often under appreciated by the fans and the media. But he's mixing it up about as well as he ever had right now and I think a lot of that has to do with Shaun Ellis, GA Mangus and Bubba.