When it comes to recruiting, I’m a macro kind of guy. There’s always going to be the five-star player that flops and the two-star kid who develops into an All-American, but, by and large, a team that consistently brings in top ten classes is going to perform better over the long haul than a school that brings in top forty classes.
Along those lines, I confess to being puzzled by an assertion I see being made regularly these days that Georgia’s current woes can be traced in part to a decline in talent (usually accompanied by a shot at Garner for being overrated as a talent evaluator). Yet, even the Florida coaches readily acknowledge that both schools tend to chase after the same caliber high school players. So unless you think that Meyer is simply a much luckier fellow than Richt in terms of talent panning out, this just doesn’t make much sense.
Which brings me to a couple of posts I ran across at the Between The Hash Marks blog. The first purports to take a look at the offensive talent in the SEC, based on Rivals recruiting ratings. Here’s how the numbers play out (you can see his methodology in the post):
Not exactly sucktastic, eh?
The defensive rankings tell pretty much the same story, I’m afraid.
So the story here is that Georgia recruits at a high level – on the same plane as three SEC schools ranked (at least as of today) in the top ten in the country. Yet the Dawgs sit ranked at or near the bottom of the conference in many offensive and defensive categories and are struggling to become bowl eligible. You folks really want to stick with that declining talent argument?
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