Thursday, February 4, 2010

Signing Day 2010 - Northwestern, Notre Dame, Illinois

From our friend abroad, Alec Kinczewski, who loves prep-to-college like I love the NFL Draft :

To cover Northwestern's recruiting class I'm very encouraged. While it doesn't have the 5-star and 4 -star players of other programs, there's one tell tale sign that our program has its act together: there were only 17 scholarships.

Why so few when other schools often sign 25-30? Because no one transfers or drops out of NUs program. While some don't bloom, being able to send out seniors on special teams gives NU a special advantage: for the old timers, that's their big event and they care about it.

Additionally it shows that we don't have the same discontents as other programs, and as I've learned in the Army an office cancer must be given the Moses treatment (banished and forgotten... of course that didn't work out too well for Ramses).

Additionally, the NU class has 13 guys who were team Captains and a collective GPA of 3.5, so as Fitzgerald says in the link these are the guys our program needs.

I still reminisce to how excited I was when Brett Basanez signed with NU (after an epic career at St. Viator including one of the all time great IL HS football games against Joliet Catholic in the playoffs). Who is NU's QB in waiting right now?

Now those three star players take me into my evaluation of Notre Dame's class: it isn't about who you recruit but what you do with them. Kelly made a reputation for developing talent at Cincinnati. I don't think he ever had a top 50 recruiting class there.

Now he has a top 20 (much lower than any of Charlie's) and a couple years of stocked up talent. I'm very curious to see what he does with Charlie's leftovers. While Charlie wasn't known for talent development, he did show how guys like Golden Tate can grown into studs, too bad he couldn't do it with more players.

As for Illinois, they're now in the crapper for all aspects of their football program, lets run up the score against them at Wrigley this fall!

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/college/ct-spt-0204-northwestern-main-football--20100203,0,1895805.story

1 comment:

  1. Can't believe Ron Zook kept his job. He's on Lovie Smith-type job status right now.

    Notre Dame's class looks fine. I expect good things from Mr. Kelly

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