OT: Pace of Nebraska Recruiting
Good article from Rittenberg on the slower pace of Nebraska recruiting due to their geographic isolation and consequent need to rely on official (university-paid) visits rather than unofficial (prospect-paid) visits. I don't know about you guys, but I've always wondered why Nebraska - despite consistently ranking among the top 25 recruiting classes nationally and in the top 3 recruiting classes in the conference - always seems to have such a sluggish start in receiving verbals.
Of course, it will be interesting to see if Nebraska is able to sustain their recruiting success with now even elite prospects feeling tremendous pressure to commit before their senior year of high school.
http://espn.go.com/blog/bigten/post/_/id/76405/nebraska-must-be-patient-in-recruiting
I don't hate Nebraska and I don't wish them harm, but I honestly honestly think that steroids had a lot to do with their previous trench-driven success.
What I've noticed is their highest rated guys they bring in, usually transfer (Cody & Aaron Green, Braylon Heard, Tyler Moore Ect..).
Kansas is? It's just outside Kansas City. It's easier to get to than Lexington or probably Chapel Hill and Durham.
how is lexington hard to get to? they have a airport 5 miles from Rumpp Arena . Chapel Hill i do agree with and you can throw Blacksburg too.
Lawerence is a suburb of a major city, so it's really no farther from an airport than like every college town in America. Ann Arbor and Bloomington are in that same boat, yet people still go there. Hell, when you account for traffic, UCLA and USC are farther from the airport than KU is.
I haven't much of a problem getting to Chapel Hill or anywhere in Durham.
Regarding Nebraska recruiting, I think a lot of people are only looking at one side of the equation. Nebraska was plenty stocked with talent well before the Big 8 absorbed the Texas schools, and that talent came almost exclusively from Nebraska, with some from the surrounding states.
Nebraska has no in-state competition, and little if any competition for Nebraska talent from out-of-state schools. Also, it has been mentioned that it is difficult for recruits to get to Lincoln. Well, that also goes for coaches and recruiters for schools outside of Nebraska, and probably just makes it tough to identify and ultimately recruit talent out of the state.
All the big programs recruit Texas, Ohio, Florida, Illinois, etc. There is a lot of competition to go along with the great deal of talent.
Nebraska, as when Penn State joined the Big Ten, will have a winning percentage lower than their historical average. But it will not be due to newfound shortcomings in recruiting.
Nebraska football and Kansas basketball both recruit nationally. They have the winning tradition to be able to pull it off. There are plenty of kids out there willing to move far away.
Geography can help recruiting, but it's not the only factor. Ann Arbor didn't move closer to Ohio when Hoke got here, but we've been recruiting Ohio much better under him than we did under RichRod or even Carr for that matter. Having ties to the state is big. Pellini is also from Ohio, incidentally.
I see where they are coming from but I really think more recruits would make it a point to visit unofficially if they were still a perrenial top-10 team.
Possibly, but it's one of those chicken and egg scenarios.
Lots of schools have a hard time getting top players to visit unofficially. Michigan often has, even when we're good. Yeah, the guys who really like us make the trip, but there are lots of guys who kinda like us who wait until they can do an official, and by then it's often too late.
We're lucky to be close to a lot of talent who can drive to see us pretty easily.
We do have more of a recruiting base, no doubt, but take a look at Boise State's 2002 recruiting class vs. their 2012 class. Boise wasn't really on many people's radars in 2002 but got more exposure and moved from exclusively 2 star guys to more 3 star ones.
Plus, it looks like Nebraska had 5 commits before the 2012 season started and 10 before the 2011 season started.
Yeah, there's no doubt being really good helps, but Boise St is a rare case because they went from being a complete nobody to playing in BCS games and being in the top 10-ish almost every year. That's a huge jump, so I'm not surprised their recruiting followed suit.
Nebraska is already a known commodity, and I wouldn't expect on-field performance to impact their recruiting much unless they got back to being 90's Nebraska.
As for your second paragraph, I'm sure they'll be in that neighborhood again before the season starts this year.
I kind of feel like Nebraska will never really recover from firing Frank Solich. Nebraska does have a lot of the problems identified above--not near a major urban area, little football talent in-state or even in surrounding states, difficult or impossible for recruits to reach for unofficial visits, etc. But during their long run of sustained success under Devany-Osborne-Solich, they had two things working for them: (1) established winning tradition, and (2) they ran an option offense that, at least by the 1990s, did not require massive amounts of 4- and 5-star talent to run. Nebraska kind of gave up those advantages when they fired Solich.
The other big advantage Nebraska had was a huge, huge walk-on program. They regularly carried something like 170 guys on the team. Because in-state tuition there is cheap, decent players would regularly walk on there instead of getting scholarships elsewhere. These guys were able to fill gaps in the depth chart and occasionally even turn into stars.
Callahan, for some reason, discontinued this, although I believe Pellini is starting it back up.
We currently have commitments from New Jersey, Utah, Florida, and Virginia. It's convenient to have DTW so close, but it's not like it's impossible to reach Lincoln. Isn't it possible that Nebraska just isn't the hotspot of college football like it used to be?
But this year is an anomoly. Last year at this time we had 17 recruits, and only one of them was from outside of Big Ten country, and that was Chris Fox from CO. After him, our farthest commit was Kugler from Pittsburgh, or LTT from Peoria, IL, I'm not sure which is farther.
EDIT: And the year before we didn't have a commit from outside of MI and OH until June.
As a hub city, DTW helps a ton. I live on the east coast, and I am always amazed at how easy it really is to get to A2. Much easier than most places are that require an airplane trip. Also, the fares are pretty good . . . the hub thing again.
it was a major mistake for Nebraska to leave the Big 12 conference - that gave them a natural tie-in to Texas which is a big recruiting center for them. There is no real tie-in for them currently.
For all the other major conferences, they all have a 'football' state where most of the talent comes from
Big 12: Texas
Big 10: Ohio/PA
Pac12: California
SEC/ACC: Florida
Nebraska is pretty far off from Ohio and PA and they don't really have established recruiting territory there so it makes sense that they're struggling. And Texas really trails off because Lincoln is the closest Big 10 school to Texas and it's still about a 9 hr drive to Lincoln so as a Texas recruit, the closest you'll play to home is Lincoln which is still 9 hrs out. They're kind of in no-mans land now
The article is pretty accurate.
Nebraska has historically closed late in the recruiting cycle, not just during Pellini. And contrary to many comments on this thread, the Huskers have seldom had Top 10 recruiting classes.
We have little in-state or nearby (drivable distance) talent to recruit, and its expensive for recruits to fly into Lincoln on their own dime. This has been the case ever since the Devaney era. So Nebraska's always had to recruit nationally even with factors that make it difficult.
And yet we've managed to do fairly well the last 50 years. Even in our worst decade, compare us to Michigan or Ohio St. And our first 2 years in the B!G---with by far the hardest schedule in the conference--we've competed until the last week for the division and won it the 2nd year.
We'll be fine.
Yeah, you'll be fine. With the new divisions, you're sitting at the kids table now anyway.
yes you have OSU but that's what your guys wanted. The rest of the East is no big deal. PSU will be severely weakened for a long time due to sanctions and MGoBlogers seem to think Michigan St is a flash in the pan. I think the West has more good teams.
Time will tell, in the meantime we're both still in the Legends and it should be a great competition to win the division this year. And you owe me a sixpack from last season.
The article linked within what the OP posted is here - (LINK). Although this is from 2010, I think we've seen the effects of the phenomenon described in it with our own recruiting, and that is the increasining importance of the unofficial visit.
By NCAA rule, of course, those are visits made on the dime of the recruit. That being said, it seems like schools which are in destinations that are, by virtue of location, less convenient or more expensive to visit if air travel is required (as an example) have seen some shifts in their recruiting patterns. I also wonder if that trend gives schools with rich recruiting territory within reasonable distance an even greater advantage.
With regards to Nebraska, it seems to me (and ChicagoB1GRed mentions it) that they've done well enough despite the issue of location. I believe that some of the bigger names and the schools more steeped in tradition will still be able to ultimately attract some of the top talent simply because of who they are and what they offer in the way of football experience.
I think everyone is forgetting about the powerhouse Millard North High School. How many Heisman trophy winners has your high school produced? That's right. I went there.
Mustang Power!
Bo Pellini was obviously reading this thread because Nebraska picked up another recruit today...from Texas, no less. He has none of the stars, and sports other offers from North Texas and that's all. Could be a sleeper.
our second recruit......we're building a powerhouse!
Don't know what to tell you. Michigan has fantastic recruiting in-state, in-region, and certainly more than holds their own nationally. And your record, whether all-time or more modern times, speaks for itself.
Nebraska has always been more top 25ish as far as recruiting and yet been one of the elite programs when it comes to winning and championships, especially in the modern era.
Both programs are clean, at least as clean as a big time winning program can be. Winning a lot and winning clean....something to be proud of.
As a current student at the University of Nebraska who came from out of state, the school is a total bitch to get to. And although it may slow down recruiting, I'm not too worried about the future of the program. The state of Nebraska is one of the few states where one can walk into a bar on a Sunday in the Fall, and a TV won't be turned to FOX or CBS, but rather the Big Ten Network's replay of Husker game from the day before. The Cornhuskers are the professional team for the Omaha/Lincoln area, and the state is unique in the fact that it finds its identity through two things: Corn and Football.
One (unrelated) story I'll never forget is one day I was at the doctor's office after an intramural injury, and an elderly lady was sitting in the waiting room next to me. She turns to me and asks if I went to the USC-Nebraska basketball game the night before, to which I replied I didn't. She told me it was a bummer because the crowd theme was a luau in honor of Tai Webster, a point guard from New Zealand who had committed in August. To hear a lady who looked like Betty White talk about Nebrasketball recruiting like that still astounds me to this day.
FWIW, I did a diary on Nebraska recruiting last May 20, and at that point Nebraska had 7 recruits: 1 from TX, 1 from NE, 3 from Ohio, and 1 from Wisc. Pellini seems to have acknowledged that he needs to do a better job of refocusing on TX recruiting, but the change to the B1G (as others have noted) has had an effect on his recruiting.
http://mgoblog.com/diaries/nebraska-recruiting-michigan-and-rest-b1g
I do have a question though. I believe the way things are set up now, universites can't pay for the athletes' trips until their senior year. Does that mean they can't get trips paid for until classes start the fall of their senior year? That seems insanely late. Especially with the way recruiting happens now, I would think allowing students paid travel the spring semester of their junior year and through the summer would make more sense.