Husky25
Dink & Dunk beat the Greatest Show on Turf.
- Joined
- Sep 10, 2012
- Messages
- 19,012
- Reaction Score
- 20,238
The talent argument, in a nutshell, is that a bunch of players who were mostly recruited to play in a BCS conference are now too untalented to even be competitive in a midmajor conference. Either the entire team is a collection of spectacular recruiting flops, or talent is not the only problem. Those are the only two choices. The "blame Pasqualoni" argument doesn't really hold up that well, because he only had 2 recruiting classes, and the assistant coaches, who do most of the recruiting, were pretty strong. The first one was mostly Edsall's, and by the time he was chucked last year, Weist and company were holding the class together with masking tape. I think Hank Hughes and Don Brown know something about recruiting, especially in the northeast. I am having a little bit of a problem with the talent argument.
For the Cummings defenders, you are right. The offense is a smooth running machine now. My bad. Much, much better offense than we would have had if Weist was HC.
That's an interesting argument until you actually get into the roster. When you do, you'll find it's a little bit of both actually and the blame Pasqualoni argument absolutely is in play here...
Admittedly, this is quick and dirty, but roughly 98% of rosters for the 2014 college season are made up of the 2010 (RS SR) - 2014 (True Freshman) recruiting classes. So I compared the recruiting classes per Rivals for those years to the roster on UConnhuskies.com.
2010 and 2011 (according to the above) are Edsall's classes. Former "Coach" Pasqualoni owns 2012 and 2013, and 2014 is a combination of the departed staff and Diaco.
What I found was really remarkable. The number of players who are no longer associated with the team from the 2012 and 2013 recruiting classes is not much less the other 3 years combined (17 to 18 by my count). Mind you that 2010 recruits have to be RS SRs in order to be on the roster so the majority of the class would have move on regardless. Also, Rival's only shows the NLI signed commits for past years so it does not show the players who back out of their verbal when Pasqualoni was relieved of his duties.
This tells us at least one of a few things: (A) The assistant coaches were NOT strong recruiters; (B) The recruits were not focused enough to be at the FBS level (a not-so-insignificant slice of the talent pie); (C) They were not developed properly between fax transmission and stepping onto the game field (i.e. poor coaching); and/or (D) They were outright flops.
Put in Philosophy 102 (Logic) terms: my guess is a combination of (B), (C), and (D) are in play here.
However, given reasons (B), (C), and (D), one can only conclude (A).