How did Kirby start pulling 5 stars year two at UGA?

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Georgia’s recruiting budget far exceeded every one else’s in the country

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This and the fact that Athens is very likely the best college town in the SEC.

Whores & Money

Georgia was coming off back-to-back 10-win seasons when Kirby took over finishing 2nd in the east those two seasons and Kirby's first. LSU was 6-6 & 6-7 with a very depleted roster though they did overperform year 1 under Kelly.

Georgia and Florida produce a ton of talent, significantly more than Louisiana in terms of numbers, not per capita.

And maybe Kirby or his staff is just better than Kelly and his staff? Also, we can't really do a fair comparison now with accounting for relative NIL money available to players (not that I really could anyway).

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Their

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FIFY

Kirby is naturally a good recruiter and refined himself learning from the best recruiter in the country pre-NIL. He copied the system and brought it to a state that has more home-grown talent.

He also set the team culture to be the same as Bama's, so in year 2 he was already in the national title game and probably would've won if it weren't for Tua.

Now. The issue for Kelly is he is not naturally a recruiter and had minimal exposure to it at Notre Dame because the academic side recruited itself.

Now, he is hurting us in three ways:

1) He doesn't like to do NIL up front and seems to not push for talent that brings it up.

2) Before even getting to the NIL point, you have to build relationships with star recruits (relative to others). We failed there sadly because recruiters (outside of Frank) aren't prioritized by Kelly. Which leads to my final point.

3) If you don't have great recruiters, they better be geniuses from a scheming and coaching perspective (Aranda primarily, but Joe Brady's concepts were huge in 2019). We don't have anyone on our staff that I would define that way. House is average at best and his recruiting is trash (even Aranda closed on Jacob Phillips) and Denbrock is a scrub.

We just got beat by Florida and A&M for our top in state recruits and we honestly never could get momentum with either. Same last year when Texas got our top DB. None of these teams are good at coaching, but we're able to out hustle us for local recruits that we truly need. And before anyone says those guys wanted to leave the state, so did Jamarr Chase, John Emery, Kristian Fulton, and a lot more. You change their minds, I don't think anyone outside of Frank has that trait.

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The issue for Kelly is he is not naturally a recruiter and had minimal exposure to it at Notre Dame because the academic side recruited itself.

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I'm not gonna sit here and try to convince anyone Kelly is as good or better than Smart at recruiting, but I have no clue what this is supposed to mean. You think because academic standards were higher at ND it made it EASIER for Kelly to get top 10 classes there?

Could you clarify how higher admission standards allowed Kelly to put recruiting on cruise control and not get any "exposure" to it while at ND?

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His class jumped to #2 his second year and really hasn’t fallen since. What is different that Brian Kelly is not doing at LSU other than NIL.

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He had relationships with a lot of them from Bama recruiting. He even took a picture of Bama's recruiting board to show recruits that were lower to gain favor.

they buy recruits.

Athens is a nice/great college town.

Baton Rouge is a $hithole