re: A&M fans....re: Sumlin

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Jackie never did this brah
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Jackie absolutely got the recruits. The '87 Class was EASILY the #1 Class in the country with Randy Simmons as the overall #1 player in the country and Darren Lewis no lower than #5. He OWNED the state of Texas and pretty much got what he wanted from Louisiana most of the time as well as cherry picking nationally. Love Sumlin and he is on the same level but Jackie was a STUD recruiter. He really tore it up with defensive recruits and RB's.

As to Sumlin. He has been a complete program changer. He "gets it" in terms of image more than any other A&M coach I've seen and I would argue as well as any coach in the country. First thing he did was get a maniac and former A&M WC member as S&C and gave him an extra 6 weeks with the kids before Spring practice. Absolutely tore them up. He did things at A&M that just haven't been done that may sound normal at other places but were revolutionary at A&M. Little stuff like playing hip hop music during practice and completely redoing the facilities so that instead of looking great to donors they looked great to recruits. He changed up our uniforms. He changed our team entrance. The key to these is he changed them to be more modern but still have a nod to the traditional. Mainly he just exuded confidence and swagger and has no doubt he will win.

He's clearly a prepared guy as well. Every week A&M has come out ready to play and he almost seems to excel even more in road games. Everything seems to be looking 3 or 4 steps ahead. He has done an amazing job of covering up the weaknesses A&M has had talent wise this season. On paper we should not have been able to stay on the field with Bama, LSU, and UF because we simply don't have the depth of talent. Yet he has gotten every ounce possible out of this team and has then gone out and brought in far higher rated talent that fits his scheme to come in.

If you look at the '12 Class which was his first he has gotten significant contributions from well over half of them in Year 1 with several others that are clearly doing well in practice but RS'ing. He certainly gets it when it comes to going out and getting the high profile guys but he seems to even moreso understand the value of every scholarship. In the past A&M took a ton of grade risks and kids with other issues that made the rankings look good but never played a down at Kyle. Sumlin won't hesitate to drop kids that aren't getting it done in the classroom or look like a risk. That rubs some people the wrong way but in the end he cuts down on his "misses" bigtime.

The other thing in recruiting is he seems to employ the idea that he would rather take the superior athlete with the higher ceiling as opposed to the well rounded kid that doesn't have the bigtime combine stats. If you play WR for him you are either really tall and strong or track star fast or both. He also puts a huge premium on speed at the DB slots like we haven't had in a long time. On the lines and at LB he only wants top level talent and hasn't taken a lot of guys that were easy "gets" in the past that all too often didn't see the field. He'd rather take fewer but higher quality.

A lot of this is nothing new to SEC folks. That's why this is the league of champions. You expect to get mainly 4 and 5 star talent with a few 3's mixed in. It's just something we haven't seen at A&M since the early '90s.