gibson

Is anyone aware of options Red is exploring to fill the recruiting void at goalie?  Seems like a program like Michigan would have a few viable options even this late in the game.  Was Gibson defecting that unexpected since he already de-committed from our "favorite" school.

In the comments of Brian's mid-season secondary review, poster Rasmus wrote

"I'd love to see someone do a study of Gibson's tenure as WVU's defensive backs coach, from 2001 to 2007. That's seven seasons of data. Were they generally decent, or a constant liability? Did players leave for no apparent reason? And so on..."

I bit on it.

Here are WVUs rankings in Pass Defense, PD Efficiency and Total Defense:

2001: 1/8/40

2002: 55/47/33

2003: 104/45/74

2004: 32/20/37

2005: 34/30/15

2006: 109/63/62

2007: 14/28/7

First of all, throw out 2001 and 2002 since the players on those teams were inherited by RR and staff.  Also, major caveat, as always, about WVU being a Big East team.  Also, also, there's the obvious problem that simply using team measurables isn't particularly precise in evaluating DBs specifically.  Anyhoo...

What's you see is two sloppy years and three respectable ones.

What I was more interested in was the level of talent they were able to recruit at WVU among DBs. So, first to identify the DBs, I went through the team's leading tacklers from 2005 to 2007 and culled out about 18 of them through that period.  Then I looked at the recruiting stats of those 18.  Wouldn't you know it, the very highest ranked guy was one Ryan Mundy, who actually led the team in tackles in 2007.

Of the 18 guys who played DB with some regularity, the average Scout star rating was 2.2; 8 were recruited as safeties, 2 as CBs, 2 as WRs, 2 as LBs, 1 QB, and 3 were walkons.  Pretty impressive, huh?

Conclusion from rough, derivative evidence: Gibson had shit to work with -- Mundy included according to anybody who reads this board -- and made good with it.