quote:
Consistency being the keyword.

Pinkel wasn't much of a recruiter but seemed to get a lot out of his players.

Here were his classes leading up to what was perhaps his best season:

2013...rank 43...0 five stars...2 four stars
2012...rank 33...1 five stars...3 four stars
2011...rank 56...0 five stars...1 four stars
2010...rank 21...0 five stars...6 four stars

2013 Season Final AP poll number 5

The next year however MU fell to 14th in the final AP poll and finished unranked in 2015.

He did great with the talent he had to work with, but he also had a ceiling with that talent. That ceiling was not winning conference and/or national titles. As others have mentioned, there hasn't been a single national champion and very few P5 conference champs who have accomplished those feats without highly ranked recruiting classes. At a certain point, you have to have talent to win big regardless of how good you are developing the players you have.

But you are right that consistency is very important in what I said. Coaches may have some bounces go their way and have a season where the have a top 5-10 finish with 3 star talent, but there is no staying power in the top 10 without signing those 4 and 5 star kids.

People, far too many times, see these outlier overachievers or blue chip busts and somehow come to the conclusion that because outliers exist that recruiting doesn't mean anything. There's a reason why the teams you see winning year in and year out aren't just trying to find diamond in the rough players no one else is recruiting. Why is that? Because, on average, player evaluations are accurate more than they aren't.

This post was edited on 1/26/22 at 4:58 pm