re: Class of 2018 Recruiting MEGATHREAD: So Long Old Friend Edition

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Eddie Smith, 3-star CB, Salem (Slidell, La.)

Eddie Smith was offered by Alabama earlier this month and the coaching staff has made him one of its priority targets. This will be Smith’s first trip to Tuscaloosa. He told SEC Country earlier this week that he is down to Alabama, Mississippi State and Tennessee.

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Brevin White, 4-star QB, Paraclete (Lancaster, Calif.)

Brevin White added an offer from Alabama late Thursday night. He took a red-eye flight from California to Birmingham on Thursday. I’m not going to lie — I don’t know much about White’s recruitment other than the fact that he committed to Princeton, which tells me that academics are a massive priority to him. Sources close to Alabama have been quiet about White and if he’s now the priority over Purdy.

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Deyavie Hammond

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Did anyone figure out whether White could get an academic scholarship and just walk on?

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Not many people in the college football world will take a shot at the SEC when it comes to recruiting, so we have to admire Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy for his boldness.

Speaking in an ESPN.com story by Jake Trotter that focuses on recruiting in the state of Texas, Gundy threw a punch at SEC schools, whose recruiting hauls from Texas have decreased recently after a huge boom a few years ago.

“‘It’s pretty simple: The shiny new product of the SEC wore off,’ Gundy said, while likening SEC recruiting in Texas to the recent fad of the hoverboard. ‘Everybody rode them around for two or three years — now you don’t see them anymore. The newness has worn off.'”

Gundy is not wrong, as Trotter points out:

“The SEC’s arrival into Texas recruiting began to culminate in 2014 and 2015, when the conference bagged the state’s top three players in back-to-back years. In 2016, the SEC clobbered the Big 12 in Texas, landing eight of the top 15 players in the Lone Star State, even with only one signing coming from the Aggies.

During the inaugural early signing period, the Big 12 inked 15 of the 24 Texas players ranked in the top 150 nationally. With five more such unsigned players either committed to or strongly considering Big 12 schools, that number could balloon even more next month.”

Gundy says the players he and the rest of the conference recruited had become “infatuated” with the likes of LSU and Ole Miss and other schools from the SEC West to where Texas A&M had jumped.

But, Gundy’s assertions about the SEC becoming less shiny get a little more curious when looking at the recruiting rankings for 2018.

Three of the conference’s programs — Georgia, Alabama, and Auburn — currently sit in the top-10 of 247Sports’ composite rankings. The Big 12 has two.

Before you get to the next Big 12 team at No. 19 on the list, there have been a total of seven SEC teams ranked already.

Oklahoma State is all the way down at, wait for it, No. 30. Behind nine SEC teams. Those in glass houses…

So even if the SEC isn’t having as much success in the state of Texas, where high school football is supposedly the best in the nation, most of the conference’s programs are still running laps around the Big 12 in overall recruiting.

SEC coaches have zeroed in on Georgia, Florida, and Alabama, among other southeastern states, to bring in supreme talent.

Georgia’s six 5-star 2018 commits are double that of the rest of the Big 12 combined. None of those six players are from Texas.

So perhaps one reason SEC programs have regressed in Texas is a simple one. They don’t need to go.

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And is he exactly the coach that should be spouting off?

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I don't know what you're getting at here Saint, but take that mess to the QB thread.

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If we keep everyone currently committed to us and added Surtain, ITS, NPF, Waddle, Ross and Purdy our score would be 312.37. That would jump ahead of Georgia and Ohio State for the #1 ranked class.

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