quote:
zimba, fairley., ronnie brown, cady, jason c., Mcneil, groves, dansby, obomanu, spikes, torbor, brandon jacobs ect. disagree.

to the guy who said

"tubs never actually recruited"

Ziemba and Fairley are the only two that were recruited after 02(Groves may have been 03), and Fairley was a 3 star guy that really didn't have that many offers. Tuberville did pretty well recruiting for his first 4-5 years, but you'll be hard pressed to find anyone that will tell you he did very well in his last 3-4, especially with the # of academic casualties he had and guys that got in school, but couldn't stay in school. We had a great class in 06(I believe) on paper, but something like 1/3 of those guys never even made it past a year or two because they either didn't make it into school, or failed out.

That seems to be a big difference so far for this staff. They're getting good players that are actually going to make it in and stay in. It's only the third year, so time will tell, but out of 32 guys last year, only one didn't make his grades.

I also think a good bit of this has to do with the recent surge of sites like rivals, Scout, etc. They've really only gotten to the level of popularity they have in the past 5 or so years. They've been around longer than that, but they are much more closely followed than they used to be, for a number of reasons. But as they were getting so popular, our recruiting classes were taking a bit of a dip - specifically 07 and 08... and I think people kinda saw that as a reflection of our program. Now we have new coaches that are absolutely getting after it on the recruiting trail, and they're doing well, and for some reason it's a shock that they are succesful.

I said this in another thread on the recruiting board, but after last year, I saw, or either read, an interview with Chizik, and he was asked something along the lines of - what do you put the most focus on for your job as a coach? He said recruiting. He said he thinks about recruiting 24/7/365. He knows how important it is to bring in good talent, especially with guys like Saban right next door being just as obsessed with recruiting as he is.

This post was edited on 1/21/11 at 4:09 pm