re: Who will be the next elite team in the SEC?

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Never underestimate our bullshiteting prowess

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Never fails.

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The best hope for the Mississippi schools is they have an alum that turns into a T Boone Pickens/Phil Knight/Walton family that decides to drop $300 mill on the program. Don't know who that could be though.

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That's going to be me.

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Florida has the the 2nd best recruiting area in the SEC behind A&M, the difference being UF, with the right coach and success, can dominate the state...A&M has a mountain to climb. Boom looks like he can make good staff hires, it's just a matter of undoing Myer taking a nap and being (understandably) bamboozled by the persona of Weis. But, just a heads up, after the Spurrier beatdowns of the 90's, UF will always now be the pond lizards on LSU gameday.

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Sorry but this just isn't really true. UF gets competition in Florida from FSU and the rest of the SEC trying to poach as well as Miami when they aren't in melt down mode as they currently are. Yet there is still plenty of talent and UF wins the battle most of the time.

For the last decade Texas has been dominant in Texas recruiting with OU, LSU, and even OSU getting quite a bit of the largesse and A&M generally just having Top 20ish classes. It hasn't always been that way. In the mid 80s through the mid '90s A&M dominated recruiting in Texas and it wasn't the cheating (everybody got paid back then), it was the winning. Problem was when Texas and OU went crazy with their facilities in the late '90s A&M was slow to react and got behind. Then you add the Frantastic era and only now is A&M digging itself out.

A&M could always compete with Texas when we were winning in the recruiting game. If you add in winning AND the SEC with all the TV coverage, big games, and NFL pipeline? A&M will crush them. Right now LSU is probably just as big of a threat but if A&M can win on the field they will keep those kids at home.

The key for A&M is just winning. Once A&M wins all the other factors go in to place in their favor. I mean think of it this way, A&M does a very solid job of recruiting right now and the last time we won a New Year's Day game was freaking 1988 while LSU, Texas, and OU all have a trophy case of NC's, Conference Titles, and BCS wins in the last decade. What do you think happens if A&M actually proves it can win those games? That is why it is the sleeping giant.

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And the thought that we will just crumble back to mediocrity once he does hang up his spurs is just asinine. So we have a successful program, finally, and we're just going to hire some schmuck off the street to let the program go to hell? If anything we would, hopefully, learn from Florida's mistake and skip that Zook-like coaching debacle in favor of the young promise of a Meyer-like up and comer.


It's not that easy to replace a coach. Unless you spend the $$$$ to get a big name, you take a risk on a hot up and comer, who sometimes just doesn't work out.

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Sometimes you can go out and hire the big name and it is even a bigger disaster. Everyone forgets that it was only a decade ago that A&M went in and got Fran from Bama when he was considered one of the best coaches in football AT THE TIME. Then he proceeded to take a team that hadn't had a losing season in almost 20 years and destroy it. Hiring coaches always is a crapshoot.