closetojumping

A DE talking about development as something sacred and then going to play for a Mike Elko team is like these guys that talk about "academics" and then signing with LSU or Oklahoma. Mike Elko has been a FBS DC or HC for going on 16 years now. In those 16 years, 4 DEs have been drafted. Duke Eljifor in the 6th from Wake. Khalid Kareem in the 5th at ND. Demarvion Leal (a high 5 star) in the 3rd and Michael Clemons in the 4th at ATM. If you give Elko all of the development credit for the defensive players drafted under his watch in 15 years, meaning guys drafted within 3 years following a year of his coaching as DC or HC, he's had 24 guys drafted. Kevin Johnson, a DB at WF, was drafted the spring of 2015, roughly one year after Elko got to campus. Jerry Tillery was drafted in the 1st round 3 years after Elko's one year on ND's campus had passed. Both of those are as stretchy as you can get for credit to the coach and those are the only 2 1st round defensive players ever drafted around Elko. Elko's highest ranked 5 stars, Leal and Jaylon Jones, eventually went in the 3rd and 6th. We've done a lot of review about Elko the Developer mythology at Surly. The dude is basically an excellent X's & O's guy with an extremely checkered history as a developer of talent on defense. For comparison, Kwiatkowski has put 5 DEs into the league and 2 were 1st round picks, along with a 2nd, 3rd and 7th. Never mind the 39 total defensive players with one less year of credit as a DC.

1) Salary caps will have little impact on NIL. 2) No one can prevent an adult from earning money for their name, image and likeness. The NCAA is spineless and any effort to prevent something as banal as a booster paying a player for a signed jersey will collapse under review/in court. The NCAA can't do a damned thing about corporations being involved either. There is also nothing shady about any of it and the geezers who continue to whine about such things need to get a grip. The market sorts the rates for contributions from players and they get paid. 3) Added revenue for players will inherently dim some of the needs from collectives and will be much welcomed. 4) Larry Ellison being involved changes very little for anyone except Michigan itself. We have already been dealing with Phil Knight. There will be others. Some teams will show up occasionally and go nuts while other teams have a big backer who can swoop in whenever they want for the right target. 5) Texas, Ohio State and a few others have built a layer cake foundation for winning each cycle if the results on the field and in the draft are present.

There’s more going on here than just attitude and heart. He’s got real off the field problems and the only way they get fixed is if he eventually wants to fix them. There’s a reason other programs aren’t all over him and also why Texas told him to not let the door hit his ass on the way out.

Texas has speakers pumping noise on its sidelines.

He certainly wasn’t prioritized this week, and for good reason. You can’t drop a certain TD with comparable fighting for oxygen on be sidelines while you do that. I watched him play in the fourth. Right in front of me. He absolutely played and was perfectly healthy.

I assume there’s going to be a big OOC home and home in 2028/2029 to replace the prior set up with Georgia or Florida or whoever it was. I’m assuming a Big 10 team or Notre Dame, plus La Tech and UTSA and 9 SEC games.

I was about to say, watching Gabe Ikard run his mouth about Hill while constantly talking up Stutsman is quite rich. If you need a LB to show up 8 yards down the field, maybe make a tackle, and then prance around like he’s accomplished something, Danny Stutsman is your guy.

Just looking at that list of freshmen, holy smokes, man. It really looks like an amazing class, and that’s on top of the excellent classes ahead of it. It’s gratifying that almost none of these guys is a “must play” for Texas this season, yet still, guys are forcing their way into legitimate minutes because of their talent.

147 tackles, 9 sacks, 2 FFs, 2 INTs if you remove the 2 Arkansas games from his numbers. Those are good stats, but not great stats. That Arkansas 2022 game has done a lot of work for this dude. I assume he has 10/19 circled on his calendar this year, so Arkansas better prepare themselves for an asswhipping.

Thanks for the post and it’s a great topic and visual. I think the big thing, for me at least, is that the FCS opponents and really weak G5 opponents are still skewing things horribly with a 3 game sample size. Directionally, though, it all looks right. Does a staff develop their program out of the left side of the graph as the season goes on? That will be interesting to track as well. The big thing with Georgia is that they really are lacking game breakers on offense. They look pedestrian, and not just because Bobo is a vanilla comfort hire. They have a decent poster base and that’s the big thing they’re wringing their hands about on their boards right now. I don’t blame them given the firepower they’re about to face from here to the Ga Tech game.

Lists like this are dumb when the season is only two weeks old. I watched some of Ohio State on Saturday night and Smith is legit. That said, the opponents have not been legit. Akron and Western Michigan tell us nothing about how Smith compares to other talents. The same is true for Williams at Bama. Western Kentucky and South Florida? Okay then. Lagway's being touted for playing against a team that wouldn't be a top 10 6A high school team in Texas. At least let these guys all play a couple of conference games before doing this kind of thing. Or at least play road games/neutral games against the likes of Clemson and Michigan first.

He made all of that up out of whole cloth. TOF provided nothing and I doubt most of the other collectives did either. He's using the specious assumptions that he and others at On3 are making regarding deal values for various players. Some of it is correct and some of it absolutely is not. But, hey, it will now be cited as fact by various talking heads and the like.

Of course, who the hell knows? But my view is that Josh Heupel just looks run of the mill kind of fat. Like a dude that doesn’t work out and eats a lot of fast food. Elko looks legitimately like he’s doing some hard-living. I thought/think the same way about Chris Beard and Elko probably weighs 100 pounds more than him. It’s all just one idiot’s opinion though.

“a few” is doing a lot of work in this post. There is nothing healthy-looking about The Elk. I assume he’s chugging a handle on a nightly basis based on recent photos.

If you’re “scared to death” of your fall drills and player health, maybe don’t hire a guy who has literally killed a player to be your DC?

Harold Perkins, who is certainly talented, pretty much gets lazily added to this kind of stuff constantly. Last year, Phil Steele called him the best defensive player in the country ahead of the season. If you remove Perkins' 2 games against Arkansas in each of the last two seasons, there's not much left. Moreover, LSU used him idiotically last year and he was rarely an in-game factor outside of spying the opposing QB. Maybe Blake Baker helps him live up to the hype this year, but if not, a rudimentary review of his performances should merit omission if they're anything like the last two seasons.

Boy, that Kenny Baker really is a home run hire.

Mike Farrell is a washed-up Texas hater from way back. He’s on Full Ride every week and pushes constant hearsay and Internet rumors as his own scoop and facts. He’s hired a few clickbait drivers and they’ve already posted multiple trash articles about Texas. The writer you’re lauding here wrote those articles and considers himself a professional gambler. Classy guy. You can check the trashy articles for yourself if you like on that same garbage heap site that you linked for us. There’s nothing in that link but stuff from Albert’s’ wikipedia page, dirty laundry about the Schlossnagle hire and the writers’ own potshots about Alberts as a person. I’m no Alberts fan, but that article is trash, as is the scumbag who wrote it and his employer. Linking to that gives them money and clicks and works against Texas on the Internet.

Second round, guy. Come on.

They looked like twins at one point in time. Peak Berkman was peak Herry Gamilton.

What's the count up to at this point? Also, I'm sure this is a DT commit. Texas is just going to steamroll there, I can feel it.

BTW, as an amusing (to me at least) adjacency, I nominate SMU for the best portal TB room. Jaylan Knighton, LJ Johnson, Camar Wheaton and Brashard Smith offer a who’s who of former top hs recruits trending heavily toward Busttown, USA.

It's odd not to see Penn State in the top 5 and only listed as Honorable Mention. I say that more as an indictment of the top 5 list than what PSU returns. The PSU production in 2023 was down and surprised folks, but that was mostly due to Singleton having injury issues. So they're punished for it coming into this season. Conversely, Henderson and Judkins had good, not great, 2023 seasons as well, but, gee golly, they're the top backfield in the country, apparently. Henderson still had injury issues (he missed 3 games in the middle of the season) and assuming that risk fades with him in 2024 seems odd. He's had those problems two years in a row. Judkins, meanwhile, was force-fed the ball at Ole Miss last season and in 2022. That dude had 271 carries in 2023 and averaged 4.2 ypc. That's a precipitous drop from 2022, in which he carried the ball 274 times for 5.7 ypc. Bear in mind, OSU TBs will be running behind the weakest OL of the teams in the top 5 and the rest mentioned besides UCF. That's not good for a TB with injury problems and another who has been damned near abused as a workhorse. The word online about Judkins from the posters for Ole Miss, of course to be taken with a grain of salt, is that the guy has taken too many bullets and the resulting decline is obvious. He allegedly became a malcontent over his use and Ole Miss, Transfer U, packed his bags for him and bought his bus ticket to Columbus when the season ended. So, yeah, sure, Ohio State has the best TB room in the country because ... names. Beyond all of that, it's comical to see a list of top TB stables for 2024 and yet Oklahoma State isn't mentioned. Ollie Gordon alone merits a mention, and they always seem to have the next guys up with enviable capabilities compared to most other alternatives in other programs.

The notion that recruiting rankings don't matter is still a popular position permeating CFB discussions across the Internet and in sports bars all across the country. I am curious what the 2024 draft class might tell us regarding that and other takeaways when thinking about how the services handle their bs. We've only seen Round 1, but I figured some thoughts from that round alone could be interesting. I put together some simple numbers that are spoilered below as a resource. Here are a few takeaways: 1) If you want to be a high draft pick, it is an imperative to play for what will now be P4 programs or Notre Dame. Verse may or may not have been discovered when at Albany. Besides him, you have Mitchell. 30 picks started at P5 and 31 finished at P5. 2) ESPN and Rivals were consistently rating these players lower, sometimes much lower, than 247 and, when they were ranking guys, On3 (they started ranking in 2021). This isn't surprising to many of us paying attention, I think, but it's crazy how much credence both services are still given when they're as lazy or biased as it gets. 3) 15.6% of the 32 picks are former 5 stars. 5 stars represent less .5% of the recruiting classes each cycle. Yet again, the notion that a 5 star ranking should carry some credence is fully validated by this first round. 4) Half of the picks were 4 stars while 4 stars represent roughly 15-20% of each ranked recruiting group. Again, the "coach up them 3 stars that want to be a X University ballplayer!" is folly as a general rule. If you find yourself saying this as a fan, you'd better damned sure hope you have a coach like Jonathan Smith or Kalen Daboer developing your team, otherwise you're probably screwed. 5) One place in which the rankings are suspect is on the OL. We knew this, but it is still stark. 5 of the drafted OLs in the first round were 3 stars. 2 4 stars and 2 5 stars. The 2 4 stars were ranked in the 300s and barely reached the 4 star ranking. One of those 4 stars is Joe Alt, who ESPN and Rivals basically thought was worthless. Of the 5 stars, Latham is the highest consensus ranked player of the 32 draft picks. He was viewed as about as can't miss as there ever are. Strong recruiting work by Kyle Flood on that one. The other guy, Mims, was similar and consensus ranked #10 in the same class. In effect, even can't miss guys ... miss (Tommy Brockermeyer was consensus #6 in the same cycle as these two, also solid recruiting work by Flood in terms of signing him), but you'd like to land those and otherwise have an OL coach who knows what in the hell they are doing with raw materials when they sign them. 6) 9 transfers out of 32 picks (28%), 4 QBs, 3 DEs, 1 WR and 1 OT. Not sure if there's anything to make of that, I guess. 7) Of the 7 WRs taken, not one was a 5 star. Worthy was the highest ranked of the group at 55. In just a cursory review of the WR rankings over the 2017-2022 period, you basically will wind up with like one 1st round pick out of every five 5 stars, with some sprinkled in later picks, and a majority of them being busts outside of that. Rankers might miss more at WR than any other spot and should consider factoring in off-the-field issues/character due to the high diva factor at this position. The idea that Agiye Hall outranked Marvin Harrison Jr in the same class by 30+ spots is somewhat comical. It's a small sample size and all that, so make of it what you will. I'm curious if others have any thoughts when looking at this, however.

I was listening to Chris Plank on College Sports Sunday yesterday on XM84. He’s part of OU’s broadcasting team and a homer accordingly. Otherwise, he’s a good listen. Anyway, coming back to Houston from a game in Austin two years ago, they had him on as a guest. OU was 3-0 and had just routed Nebraska. They asked him what OU’s biggest weakness was on that team. Long pause, then almost breathlessly “I really don’t think they have any” just before going in the tank against KSU, TCU and 0-49 vs Texas. So he’s hosting yesterday and he recounts the OU spring game. He declares that their defensive front is going to be amazing while also stating that they’re probably going to have to start two freshmen on the DL. After whining about Manning getting hyped for a spring game output during an earlier segment, he also tells the audience that Jackson Arnold is still a work in progress and his struggles are due to age (same class as Manning and one of the QBs that morons touted as better than Manning). The OL was a sieve. They have a dude in Burks and the secondary is supposed to be solid. The whole segment was grim if you’re an okie and kind of hilarious if you’re not.