It’s about getting a guard at the right gate early.
Despite being 2,800 miles away from Athens, Eason understands the importance of helping recruit players from the state of Georgia. After all, over one-tenth (31) of the ESPN Junior 300, is made up of players from Georgia. Obviously, Georgia won’t be able to take them all, but targeting the right in-state players is critical for future success.
“We know we have a tremendous talent base in this state and if we get the best ones, we are going to be in really good shape,” Richt said “We also know that there are more than we are allowed to take so we are not going to be able to get them all. We have to do a good job of targeting the right guys and getting after them.”
One of Georgia’s top overall targets, athlete Mecole Hardman, said some of the Georgia coaches have tried to sell him on the opportunity to play for the home-state team.
“I hear it all the time from Coach [Jeremy] Pruitt and Coach Richt,” said Hardman, who has a top three of Georgia, Tennessee and Auburn. “They say, ‘Hey, it’s your home state — come play for your home team.’ Georgia, in my opinion has the best talent in the nation as I see it. They try to sell us on getting everybody together in Georgia to come play for Georgia. We definitely hear that stuff a lot.”
It just feels like Georgia’s done a nice job of late adapting to the current realities of football recruiting. And, again, you have to give Richt a certain amount of credit for remaking his approach to a key factor in program success. Now, let’s see some dividends from it.
Get The Picture 
I too like the overall approach, but I’m also realistic that the days of being loyal to your home state (and thus not leaving) are long gone. Thus, I don’t necessarily fault CMR for not keeping more guys home and/or losing top recruits to out of state programs.
Our culture is more transient than ever, particularly among younger Americans in the 18-30 demographic, in which they often are more intrigued about moving away from home, discovering new areas that pique their interest, etc. I live in an area that is a magnet for younger types, yet even many of the locals here are choosing to attend school or start their career elsewhere. My immediate neighbors kids have moved away to places like Cali, NYC, Seattle, Texas, and Chicago, and I suspect the overall trend will continue.
Fortunately for us, Eason decided to do the same by leaving Washington and deciding to attend school 2000+ miles away.
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The kids go where they have the best chance to be successful. If they are a RB, this wouldn’t be the best year to select UGA, but next year will be an open door for two or three. Now is a great time to commit to UGA if you are a receiver because you don’t have to worry about the level of QB throwing to you and where he will end up in College or afterwards. If you are an O or D lineman, this is a great time to grow with a QB and hosses galor.
It just depends on the school and the opportunity offered by each one each year. It’s kinda hard to keep the best RB in Ga instate when he has an excellent opportunity elsewhere. It’s not UGA’s or Richt’s fault if they go elsewhere except that the AJC will tell you otherwise with their sports page headlines.
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Great point, Cojones. Taj Griffin would have likely never played any meaningful snaps at Georgia because he wasn’t a fit for our system. Oregon was the perfect place for him as a quick, undersized running back. I wish him the best out West and hope we get to see him play against us in a CFP game.
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You posted the best example of my point. Perfect.
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And I like it very much when they choose to go as far away as Oregon.
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Yep, especially when he could have been a great fit at the Barn or Ole $iss.
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All of the pundits have been busting our chops about in-state recruiting. If you want to come up with a list of problems that have affected the program, anything related to recruiting has to be way down the list (except offensive line recruiting). We can’t sign all of the players in Georgia because we want to recruit nationally for QBs (see Stafford, Cox, Eason, Murray, Bauta, Park, etc.) and then we want to cherry pick other players (Gurley, Marshall, Michel, Massaquoi, Ramik Wilson, Theus, etc.) from out of state.
As 3&G mentions above, some kids want to go out of state for whatever reason and aren’t going to give UGA anything beyond lip service (see Raekwon McMillan). Kids in the Atlanta area typically don’t grow up here with a close tie to UGA because their parents went to school elsewhere (see Mitch Hyatt).
The goal for in-state recruiting should be to target the right athletes who want to play for UGA and focus effort on recruiting those guys. Close on > 80% of those targets consistently. The case of Trent Thompson should be exactly how we recruit in-state players – we focused on him, made sure he committed early and stayed committed throughout the process.
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“Kids in the Atlanta area typically don’t grow up here with a close tie to UGA because their parents went to school elsewhere (see Mitch Hyatt).”
But those kid’s parents came here for careers – and those jobs can be pretty slim pickins in our border states. I’d say having a UGA degree vs. Clemson degree when job hunting in GA is a valuable commodity.
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WCD, I totally agree with you. Our coaches need to sell that point. A Georgia degree opens a lot of doors in Atlanta that may be closed otherwise.
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“you have to give Richt a certain amount of credit for remaking his approach to a key factor in program success”
As opposed to just expecting it to be par for the course for someone making $80K/week?
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It has been demonstrated over and over again that he is not just “par” for the course..you’re just not willing to accept anything that is not right in your wheelhouse.
Carry on.
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“It has been demonstrated over and over again that he is not just “par” for the course”
I never said (or even implied) otherwise. Re-tooling your approach to adjust with the times should be par for the course for someone at his level. Maybe you should read what I wrote again, unless “you’re just not willing to accept anything that is not right in your wheelhouse” 😉
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Funny how we translate what we give someone for a salary into his ability to mesmerize kids against their will. I can remember when the fans and civic leaders did as much or more recruiting of our instate players as any coach we ever had.
If you are a fan, no one is holding you back from helping make your team better. Sitting on your hands and shoveling all your wants on someone else because they accept the largess we thrust upon them seems like some boring shit.
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Cojones, you must not have met B165 before. He’s the resident troll under the bridge. 🙂
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I’ve met and ignored his crap for a while, but the lower he moves his shots, the more he degrades his message.
I used the “If” word before fan.
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I’m sure B165 comes in peace.
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So we can’t expect a person making $80K/week to re-tool his approach to keep up with the times? LOL ok 😉
Just once I’d like to see us ahead of the curve on something instead of heaping praise on Richt for finally starting to do something the best coaches have already been doing for several years.
I guess all that you have are ad-hominems though.
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The Roquan Smith signing doesn’t qualify?
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LOL, yeah, I’m sure that is gonna start paying big dividends for our program’s success any day now 😉
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I wasn’t being amusing. Signing a sought-after kid without an NLI is likely to become a bigger deal than you seem to expect. And you have to like the aggressiveness the staff showed getting news to Smith’s coach about the UCLA coach leaving for the Falcons that started the whole process. Or at least you should if you’re even slightly open-minded about the staff.
Instead of doing the usual knee-jerk complaint, why don’t you give an example of what Richt should do to get ahead of the curve in recruiting?
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Based on the last two sentences in your post I was under the impression that we were talking about things that would pay dividends for the program’s success. Signing Smith without an NLI might encourage other schools to do so, maybe even a lot of other schools. I don’t see how that movement, if it occurs, directly benefits our program’s success, though.
I’m not complaining, I just think it’s silly that we heap praise on him for doing something the best coaches started doing years ago. It’s the quintessential Disney Dawg thing to do.
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A few years ago, Georgia would have lost Smith. This year they didn’t lose a talented in state player at a position of need.
You get a four-star kid that you wouldn’t have been in position to sign not too long ago by thinking outside the box. Yeah, I can see how that new-found aggressiveness won’t pay any dividends going forward.
You bitch about “the quintessential Disney Dawg thing to do” while doing the quintessential realist thing (“Signing Smith without an NLI might encourage other schools to do so” is exactly the kind of thing you’re knocking Richt for, i.e., “doing something the best coaches started doing years ago”). Pardon me if I don’t find you any more convincing than the folks you complain of.
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We signed ONE kid with that tactic. Aggressiveness in recruiting shouldn’t exactly be a “new” thing for any coaching staff. That’s all I’m saying. I thought I made that clear.
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Which would be one more with that tactic than any other school in the country. Kinda seems like a “new” thing to me. But maybe it’s just the old reading comprehension problem flaring up again.
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If you want to grasp at straws then fine, everyone hail the “new and innovative” recruiting tactic by CMR 🙂
In all seriousness, shouldn’t we wait for the kid step on the field (or at least show up to campus) before we claim that it’s paying dividends for the program’s success, though?
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So again, back to my original question for you: if you believe something’s lacking, what do you want to see out of Richt on the recruiting front that would meet your lofty standards?
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When did I ever say something was lacking on the recruiting front?
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“Just once I’d like to see us ahead of the curve on something instead of heaping praise on Richt for finally starting to do something the best coaches have already been doing for several years.”
Random example: weren’t we one of the first programs to start loading playbooks on iPads and giving them to the players?
Or maybe that’s not a good enough example because you can’t measure its impact on a stat sheet (which seems to be one of your complains about our signing of Roquan Smith – because “shouldn’t we wait for the kid step on the field (or at least show up to campus) before we claim that it’s paying dividends for the program’s success…?” aka – we can’t measure the success on the field so it can’t be counted as a good thing). Or maybe it’s not good because then OTHER schools will start giving their players iPads with playbooks too and our advantage will be lost (which seems to be your other complaint with the Roquan Smith situation – “Signing Smith without an NLI might encourage other schools to do so, maybe even a lot of other schools”).
But that example aside, to summarize your position, Mark Richt, in all his paycheck glory, needs to figure out something that NO OTHER school is doing to help us win that we can measure whether or not it’s effective DIRECTLY on the field that no other school can even emulate (because if they emulate it we lose our advantage). Is that right?
Nick Saban, who is one of the best (if not the best) coaches in college football today can’t even pull a trick like that out of his hat. And since your entire argument is predicated on the idea that Richt makes too much money to not be innovative in a way you see fit, think about the fact that Saban makes $132,692 a week, more than $50,000 MORE than Richt makes and he still can’t hit the expectations you set forth in THIS POST. Do you think maybe your sights are set a little too high?
I’m not saying Richt is perfect but maybe instead of bitching about everything you ought to give the coaching staff a chance to show you that what they’re doing is paying off – especially since everyone on this staff except for Bryan McClendon, John Lilly, and Mark Richt has changed since 2013. Maybe it takes longer than 1 year to get new processes set in place behind the scenes and fix things.
Or maybe I’m just a Disney Dawg.
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He’s not complaining about Richt.
He’s complaining about Georgia fans not complaining about Richt.
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“to summarize your position, Mark Richt, in all his paycheck glory, needs to figure out something that NO OTHER school is doing to help us win that we can measure whether or not it’s effective DIRECTLY on the field that no other school can even emulate (because if they emulate it we lose our advantage). Is that right?”
No, that’s not even close to being an appropriate summary. Try again.
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“Random example: weren’t we one of the first programs to start loading playbooks on iPads and giving them to the players?”
Are you asking me or telling me? If you’re going to refute you should at least have a solid example that you know to be true 😉
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“If you are a fan, no one is holding you back from helping make your team better”
So, Cojones, what exactly are YOU doing to make our team better? Getting butt-hurt about someone disagreeing with you in a comment section of a sports blog doesn’t qualify, by the way 😉
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I thought I disagreed with you, not the other way around. Sounds to me that you are the one who’s crushed. I know, I know, you always do this trying to draw people into an argument then you give yourself away as a kid by putting out inane challenges. Yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard it, son.
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Mostly very mature, realistic outlooks on the realities of recruiting. While it is hard for me to not feel the tug of home, and loyalty to the state and region of my birth, I was the only one of my family that took my shot and moved all over to pursue my career goals so how can I not respect that some of these young players see their best opportunity is out of state. I do feel many overlook the convenience factor of playing close to their families and friends but the incredible TV coverage minimizes even that drawback to choosing a school further from the home area. Finding the right fit with different systems, depth chart opportunities, coaching compatibility/stability, and program potential seems the right approach. If all factors are close calls, leaning to the home area seems wiser.
All in all, it is difficult to criticize the job our coaches have done over the past decade in recruiting solid talent. Injuries, lack of maturity, bad outside influences, etc., have created short term needs but the staff has stepped up to those quickly. Perhaps OL is the one area we have lagged our expectations and fallen down to average but I see a change in this area and hope it pays off soon. The math simply makes it impossible to control your borders, and this depth of talent, combined with the proximity of other strong programs, has led to this weak whining from a few. But they will always find something to bitch about. Odd how the truly above average job we have done in bringing in top out of state performers is rarely mentioned to provide balance to the critical comments and articles.
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Well, of course Richt can’t sign all the players in Georgia, but he should be making the rest of them walk on! I mean, what are we paying him for?
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what are we giving richt credit for? If you asked 100 random frat guys in the stands on a Saturday then I suspect you would get the same answer that was quoted by richt by at least 95 of them.
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At any given moment 10 – 15 of those 100 random frat guys is yelling “PLEDGE! BRING ME A BEER.” Richt has never said this.
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“are yelling”
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I think Georgia’s recruiting is being done just fine. Year after year after year of top 10 recruiting classes seems to bear that out.
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