OT - Ole Miss Recruiting....pee in the cup

after all the talk about Ole Miss recruiting this year, I was expecting your chart to show me something more damning.  Sometimes a team just has a better year, and one recruit can influence another.  2nd year coach after a first year bowl win - I would expect their recruiting to be a little better at least.  Jumping from 19/18th ranked to 7th ranked is not that shocking at all. The 40th rank is more abnormal, but that was influenced by only 19 commits and after they lost their coach, so that makes a ton of sense.

I guess your post convinced me, but not the way you were intending.

Here’s my take on this:

First, I think the questions are fair.  We know that recruiting violations happen, and it seems neither healthy nor necessary to close our eyes whenever something looks fishy.  I also hate the “everyone does it” defense, since 1. we have no idea if that’s true and 2. even if it is true there are vast differences in the types of violations that programs could be committing and the degree to which they would provide illegitimate competitive advantages.

Still, I don’t see a smoking gun here yet.  Based on what you’ve written, Ole Miss now has four top 20 recruiting classes in the past five years.  While clearly the best of the group, this #7 class doesn’t strike me as a too-extreme-to-be-believed outlier.  (Now it’s possible that they’ve been cheating for most of those years.)  Beyond that, there are reasonable explanations for a couple of this year’s out-of-state 5-stars choosing Ole Miss.  Nkemdiche has his brother at Ole Miss and Treadwell has his friend, Anthony Standifer.  The Treadwell tweet was a little fishy, but it was just a few hundred dollars, so it’s obviously not crazy to think that he earned it legitimately.

Basically, I hope that people continue to look at this, and honestly I’d be surprised if Ole Miss is clean, but I need to see more evidence before I’m convinced.

The picture of treadwell shows him holding ...300 dollars. I had three hundred dollars whenI was in high school. Everybody acts like it was 2 grand. I still think something shady is up with ole miss.

As one of the posters said, i was expecting the chart to be more damning than it looks now too.  In fact, the first version I put together did not include the class rank column.  If you ignore that and focus on the number of 4-5 star players (12 in 2013, 15 in the previous three years combined) it starts to look a little concerning. 

Besides that and the Treadwell tweet the other thing that bugs me is the lack of an obvious innocent reason.  USC can offer California and Hollywood.  Alabama can offer championships and a pipeline to the NFL.  Oregon can offer flashy uniforms and flashy offense.  Miami can offer babes and beaches.  I'm sure the campus and girls are both pretty, but going to a land-locked rural campus to play for an inexperienced coach at a mediocre school is not the recipe for recruiting success.

I did like the comment about how some of the 5-star guys knew people there and that may have been a draw, but I'm not sure that's enough.  As with steroids, I want to trust these schools and hope they're doing it the right way......but they are making it difficult.

Treadwell didn't pick Ole Miss? Assuming low 3* take their place in Ole Miss' rating by Rivals, my quick math drops them to 12-14 ranking. Okl and Clem would also jump higher and bump Ole Miss lower if they landed Tread and Nkem, respectively. Tunsil would also go elsewhere without those two.

Freeze even noted yesterday the "serendipity" of Nkem's brother and Tread's friend, and then Tunsil joining with Nkem and Tread on board. Of course SEC recruiting is shady with boosters & hostesses - but Ole Miss just seems very lucky with a few guys and Freeze is very good at selling hope.

Saban and Miles will try to pummel them on the field this year to crush any recruiting mojo.

Here's my take on the Treadwell photo - don't tell me there's $305 there.  That is a stack of money in that picture.  And those are crisp bills.  How many of us have ever had a stack of crisp bills lying around?  If it is for a job, then he took his paycheck to the bank, asked them to give him cash back, and carried cash around.  Possible?  Sure.  Probable?  No. 

Maybe he got lucky at a casino (assuming he's old enough to gamble).  If that's the case, why would he take the picture down instead of bragging about it?  Maybe he cleaned out some gutters or had a rich uncle die  - possible, but then why not talk about it?  Instead you get the suspicious timing combined with no comments and an immediate removal.  If you do suspicious stuff we have a right to be suspicious. 

That being said, his picture also illustrates the flaw with this conspiracy theory argument.  Most of these recruits are not smart enough to avoid doing and saying stupid things.  Even if you assume all of this is with untraceable cash, how can hundreds of recruits over the years all keep this a secret?  Wouldn't there be a pissed off girlfriend somewhere that would blab to someone about how her football boyfriend wasn't the same once he got $10,000 on his recruiting trip? 

I think one place you need to look is at known "cheaters", and their recruiting prowess before and after the cheating started (e.g. Auburn, USC, and yes, OSU). Then you can build a profile of what a cheater's recruiting class looks like compared to their historical norm. There may not be any telling indicators, but even that would be useful to know.

Looking at wins and losses can be instructive, but the only thing that money could realistically guarantee you is better looking recruiting classes--I would argue that all other data is noise, because good and bad coaches cheat.

but unnecessary in the end. Ole Miss has done something so egregious that I guarantee we'll be able to watch a documentary on it 20 years from now.

As much as I want to believe Ole Miss committed major violations, the more I think they just got lucky.  They got lucky when they offered Denzel Nkemdiche a few years ago and he ended up having a younger brother who happened to be the #1 recruit in the nation.  They got lucky the Nkemdiche's grew up in a household that wanted their sons to play together. 

They got lucky Anthony Standifer didn't get in to Michigan or Notre Dame for whatever reason and Ole Miss was able to admit him.  That obviously helped with Treadwell. 

Once you start to build momentum in recruiting it's hard to stop and with 2 big names already in the fold it's no suprise others followed. 

Doesn't hurt their campus is beautiful, their female students are beautiful and most high school are probably more difficult academically. 

Was there some shady stuff going on?  Sure.  But it's the SEC and I'm almost positive they weren't doing anything those other schools weren't doing.  Is it going to matter in the long run?  Probably not a whole lot.  Bama and LSU aren't going anywhere and beside it actually helps the rest of the country that all those 5 stars didn't chose Bama/LSU/Florida/etc. 

Houston Nutt's 37-man class that single-handedly enacted the 25 players/year cap in the SEC. Good times.

keep thinking they got lucky

http://www2.wjtv.com/news/2013/feb/06/big-questions-about-ole-miss-recruit-ar-5539830/ 

Specifically, I appreciate putting in context of that Bill Simmons article, which was really well stated.  We question everything nowadays and this is really no different.

I don't know if Ole' Miss is really guilty of anything, but it certainly smells fishy enough to cause a lot of people to question the whole thing.