re: Recruiting Texas: Longhorn vs Aggies

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I somewhat agree, but the fact that both Auburn and Alabama both are able to maintain quality football programs in the same conference gives me some relief that Texas A&M and UT can both have good programs at the same time.

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Or how FSU, Miami AND UF have all had success out of Florida?

There are basically three classes worth of top 10 talent in Texas. In the 00's Texas got one, OU got one, and the last spread among the Big 12 and the rest of the nation.

As long as we get one- whether its Texas's, OU's or the third slice- we will be fine.

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If you think the clear flagship program who goes 4-2 ranked and has Espn on their longhorn network jock with the Texas is on their way back is not scary you are a moron.

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Guess I'm a moron then.

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Strong will do well there. This first class not so much, but beginning '15 he will be picking instead of recruiting.

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He's really not doing well for 2015, either. Given how accelerated recruiting is these days, he really doesn't have a great chance. He basically has to I think he'd have to lead UTx to at least 3 more wins than A&M to shift momentum back towards UTx. There's still a lot of talent in Austin, but the QB situation is still terrible. McCoy is terrible. Swoopes is still not ready. Ditto for true freshman Heard. Ash is the only decent QB, and he's coming back from season ending injury.

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I think that is a little dramatic. Even at a "reduced" level Texas can still recruit better than everyone in the Big 12. If Charlie can not underachieve he can at least keep his job via in-conference wins. It could create another SWC situation going forward though with the national end-of-year games.

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I think UT is one of those programs that's so high profile that the media "pile on" when they inch the needle to either side of center and exacerbate whichever direction it is heading. If they come out and beat BYU and UCLA the cries of 'Texas is BACK!' will be deafening and combined with wins they'll stack up against the scrub portion of the Little 12, they'll have a ton of positive pub and momentum and it will be VERY bad for us. But, if Charlie loses those two and heads to a 6-6 type of year, the media will do the exact opposite to them. There will be all sorts of drama and violins about how in the dumps UT is and stories from the media will be 'oh, the fall of Rome', and 'will the sun ever rise again?', yadda yadda. I don't think it's dramatic to say that yet another year of that narrative, and there's already been three years of it, will paralzye Charlie's program and he'll never get out of it. I absolutely believe that this year is make or break for him.

Mack annihilated RC with it. Yes, I believe part of RC's personal downfall narrative that he was getting beat in recruiting because our facilities had fallen behind, because they had, but the much larger reason was Mack coming in and fundementally changing how recruiting was done in Texas. RC would wait for A&M's Senior Day to invite kids out and offer them. Mack was targeting kids as Sophomores and Juniors, offering them as Juniors, and by the time the football season started their Senior year, which was when RC started lining up his targets, the best guys were already committed to Texas and RC had no chance.

That process of Mack's, which was adopted by everyone, is now what's making things so hard for Charlie. It's a system that benefits and sustains the team that currently has the momentum and works against the team that doesn't. Mack came in at Texas and won immediately and had a high-profile Heisman winner in Ricky. So he was able to flex all that excitement into landing all the good players two years out, which kept RC from getting in edgewise. Now Charlie's the one caught under that tide.

Charlie came in too late to do much for the '14 class since Mack had used up a lot of the official visits, then Charlie hurt it some himself with his idea that being Gestapo Charlie would be a big sell to parents, and he ended up with a luckluster result. OK, shite happens, focus on 2015. Except that Sumlin's already been camping on 2015 recuits. The better ones are already comitted - to A&M. The only way to flip them is to perform extremely well and for A&M to fall on its face.

So, more than likely, the 2016 class is Charlie's first real chance, because you have to go that far back to find kids who haven't already made promises to Sumlin. But that means that by that time the team he has to use to impress those 2016 kids has two uninspiring classes of kids playing on it and thus it may not perform as well as it needs to due to lack of talent. So by the time he finally gets a clean slate of kids to recruit, he's already damaged by the two years he had to wait before he could get to kids who weren't already promising themselves to Sumlin. It's a major uphill climb - harder for sure than it would have been if things were as they were back in RC's heyhday where you didn't recruit the kids until the end of their Senior season. So Mack's innovation is having a funny blow-back effect almost two decades later.

IMO the Aggies have their foot on the throats of the Longhorns and all the Aggies need to bury Texas is one thing and one thing only, win the SEC. If they do that then the Longhorns will be getting the leftovers. Even though that's not a bad deal. JMO

A couple of things missed in this thread:

1. The paradigm shift in recruiting: What Mack Brown did to R.C. Slocum, Kevin Sumlin did to Mack Brown...change the narrative and use methods that the other didn't see coming. A second order effect was that Brown also got outwitted, outrecruited, or outcoached by his recruiting competition, including Miles, Saban, Briles, Gundy, and Freeze, as well as Sumlin, just as Slocum was outfoxed by Stoops, Saban, Miles, and Leach, as well as Brown.

2. The mindset of Charlie Strong is mirroring Dennis Franchione. The first thing Franchione did was declare "The Wrecking Crew is dead". The next thing he did was to take the names off the jerseys. It just got worse from there. He had no preestablished relationships with Texas HS coaches and when his staff did speak to them, he talked down to them.

3. No established quarterback: David Ash is one concussion away from not being able to play football again. Other than that, they have Swoopes and Heard. Dennis Franchione kept rotating Dustin Long and Reggie McNeal during games, sometimes in the same series.

4. No depth on defense: The last couple of years recruiting misses, especially on the defensive line, will be felt in 2014 and 2015 for Texas. When Franchione took over, Slocum had one linebacker committed in the 1999 class...the one AFTER WINNING THE BIG 12. They also had just lost 2 first round picks on defense and 1 second round pick on defense to the NFL draft. The depth on Franchione's 2003 defense was horrible, ESPECIALLY at linebacker. When Jared Morris went down with an ACL injury in the Utah game, the bottom fell out after a 2-0 start. He had a WALK ON STARTING AT MIKE for 10/12 games that season. The 2003 schedule was brutal as well. Out of the following games:

Utah (Alex Smith at QB)
at Virginia Tech
Pittsburgh (Larry Fitzgerald at WR)
at Texas Tech (set a Big 12 record for TD passes by a QB: 8)
at Nebraska
Oklahoma State (Les Miles as coach)
at Oklahoma (with Heisman winner Jason White: the 0-77 game)
at Missouri (with Brad Smith at QB)
Texas

They won ONE of those games...and it took a failed 2 point conversion to keep Utah from tying the game after trailing 28-0.

There are a lot of similarities between Strong and Franchione. Hopefully for their sake, he isn't an egomaniac like that fat frick.

A couple of key differences:

-Franchione had a top 10 class for 2003. He redshirted over half of that class. Almost all of those redshirted players were 3-4 year starters.

-Charlie Strong didn't sell medical information about his players to the highest bidding donor.

-Franchione didn't say something stupid like calling what Mack Brown did "gadgets", but he had plenty of idiotic quotes of his own including:

"Get your licks in now" (trying to copy Jackie Sherrill)

"The preseason is over" (after getting embarrassed by Miami on National Television)

I'm not seeing it, cas4t; but I'm not exactly objective.
This site just happens to have more Ags than Horns, so that perspective is going to be more clearly defined.

So far, the Charlie Strong hire has done nothing for the Horns--and that stuns me.
You always expect a big splash/bounce w a new guy.
I've seen little to none.
Unfortunately for UTex, this hire looks like it is going to be a stepping stone.