There has been much talk recently on the board and in the media in general about the whole negative recruiting issue. Many of the kids we actively recruited said that Hoke did not engage in this tactic while many of those same players reported that other coaches they met with did. Lets face it - recruiting at its core is simply sales. The salesman (Head Coach) trying to "sell" the recruit on the virtues of signing on the line that is dotted (I'm looking at you Alec Baldwin) so they will attend your school and play in your program for the next 4-5 years. And having spent the better part of the last 30 years of my career in sales and sales management I can definitely tell you there are two schools of thought regarding negative selling.
School #1 states you NEVER mention your competition during your sales pitch. That the merits of your offering should be enough to sway the buyer and besides, why waste your valuable time with the client talking about the other guy. This would seem to be the current Hoke approach.
School #2 believes if you can clearly identify your opponent you go for the throat and use whatever means necessary to discredit their value in the eyes of the buyer. Turn on the TV or radio during an election and you'll see first hand this approach in all its negative glory. Coaches negative recruiting against us in the past used Carr's health (allegedly) and RR's potential termination as means of negative recruiting against Michigan's potential players.
But what about today? What could you say if your were head up against Michigan and were going negative? About the only thing I could think you could use was our poor NFL draft showing recently. Auburn, for example, if going negative in the battle for Diamond, could point to a very strong NFL presence in the last few drafts while we have no one since Brandon Graham drafted very high. And the reasons don't really matter nor does the number of players we used to place high in the draft under Carr. We have done poorly recently in grooming players for the NFL and I wonder if that isn't a big underlying reason why we are losing out on some of these last big name recruits.
What do you think?