If I am a good player, I am getting out of dodge and hitting the Portal.
HS Recruiting is Close to Flopping
- Thread starter AdamOnFirst
- Start date
Not sure what the future looks like but with a new stadium and a tier 1 AD finally, Im thinking it looks better.
At any rate, we have something called academic restrictions that are allegedly the most restrictive of any power 5 conference. Only Barnett could pull off top 20 recruit classes. And with those players, we won two championships. Fitz had a few top 50 and did great when he had Hank. Braun seems like he finally is getting some pieces together for a .500 year. Bottom line is our coach has struggled to get a quality qb to be productive. Once thats settled, I think we can get to the middle of the bigten and hopefully get to a bowl.
It is not about the revenue (which is pretty much non existent, it is about moving in the right direction before even more damage is done making it harder to recover from. He had a descent early run and we were glad to have him, but recently the program has been going in the wrong direction.
When that is the situation, keeping him around for another year can set us back multiple years because as a lame duck, it is pretty hard to get recruits to come and good players tend to leave resulting in a huge hole. On the plus side, I suppose you can say that the new coach has pretty much a clean slate to work with
I’m saying that women’s basketball at NU doesn’t move the needle enough to incur any kind of incremental actual cost.
They are different sides of the same coin. We are all looking for the results on the field (a ways away as this is the off season) Recruiting is about future results on the field. And right now, being the off season, recruiting is basically all we have to talk about.
Unfortunately we seem to be losing a lot of recruiting battles and are bringing up the rear of the BIG in recruiting. It is nice that we seem to hit on a few diamonds in the rough, We had better because otherwise we are falling farther and farther behind. Problem is it is hard to hit on enough of them to offset losing other recruiting battles
If we don’t have good talent, we won’t succeed on the field. I guess we could just all sit around and think about baseball until the season starts and just talk about that, but this is a place for people who want to discuss NU football year round with a particular emphasis on following recruiting, so it makes perfect sense to follow.
Times have changed. Especially vs the BIG of even 3-5 years ago. The top programs are still in a class by themselves. But then there were bands where there was not that much difference. Being around 60 used to being the 40 to 60-65 band that was reasonably competitive in the old BIG (say 8-10 wins). Out side of that it was hard to compete Could not handle the top teams but could be competitive with the rest. But now 60 is more in the 55 to 80 band and in the new BIG, as stacked as it is becoming, consistently recruiting at that 60 level will make even 3 conference wins (the min required to get to 6 and bowl eligible) difficult to accomplish. To be able to have even a vision of competing probably gotta be in the top 50 at the very worst. (last year we were at 55 (17th or tied for 16th int MN) and only Purdue was behind us though we were only slightly behind IA, Heck, 2/3s of the conference (12 of the 18 teams) were in the top 37. By comparison in 2019 we were at 49 and we were 11th out of 14 Only 7 teams were 37 or below out of 14. Just shows how much it has changed. 60th won't cut it
This and the OP don't recognize the screaming disaster NU was after the hazing scandal and firing Fitz. Could be some math symbol would describe it. No HC NU wants would give NU a second thought after all that. But wait - there's more! Recruits get the opportunity to play in a practice field for 2 years!
Braun deserves a marble pedestal and laurel wreath for agreeing to clean the NU stables.
Don’t pretend it wasn’t an absolutely incredible opportunity for him as well. And he was left with some good players
Yeah I think he's making like 8x as much as he was before, and nobody is going to blackball if he fails this gig. He can go back to coordinator somewhere or coach at FCS
You are possibly right. I don't know what conversations they had with other possible candidates. Braun may have been the best of a bunch of bad choices. That said, if he has another season like last year, then recruiting will continue to drop off and the future will look pretty bleak during a time when there should be momentum going into the new stadium. Re-doing the head coach search may be more fruitful this winter.
But, let's hope Braun and team kick butt this fall and build their own positive momentum!!
You mean those players that went a horrible 1-11 the year before. Those players? Braun was able to get them motivated for one of the most incredible comebacks in history against Minnesota and for a beatdown of Wisconsin at Madison. Last year he had to face an even more challenging Big Ten than Fitz ever did and he didn't finish 1-11. I liked what Fitz did, but I think he was burned out and whatever happened with the hazing, the buck stopped with him.
He can put the marvel pedestal and laurel wreath in his gazebo if he doesn’t make a bowl game this year.
Oh…you’re one of those. Lol Must be a big fan of Gragg I’m guessing.
Northwestern and several former football players finalized a settlement Monday to dismiss all claims against the school and Pat Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald’s suit against NU remains, with a Nov. 3 trial. NU unsuccessfully tried to postpone the trial to March.
NU is f*cked and they deserve it.
Isn’t it remarkable that the investment in the practice facility has yielded no benefit to recruiting? Isn’t the Taj Fitz commonly referred to as one of the best facilities in the entire nation? Given that, why would we expect any bump due to NRF?
I thought she just graduated, I didn't realize she still ha eligibility. That's a bummer, she was a bit erratic, but when she was on she was the best player on the team imho.
And I missed that entirely.
I'm not surprised and I wish them both best of luck. Another year of even less defense and less offense, and too much weight on Lau's shoulders. Bleh.
New coach will oversee a total rebuild. Expect a heavy reliance on the transfer portal.
The only external candidate who actually showed interest in the job at the time was Bronco Mendenhall, who was desperate to get literally any job he could at that point after being out of the game since Virginia fired him after the 2021 season. He ended up as head coach at New Mexico for a season (going 5-7/3-4) then bouncing to Utah State.
I'm not ignorant of the consequences of our mostly self-created program meltdown, and that we have many of the same morons, including famous morons, running our school overall and on our board of trustees is part of my lack of optimism in our institutions' ability to navigate the rapidly changing college football waters.
Fitz made a terrible hire with O'Niel and that was a huge part of that 1-11 record as was the lack of QB. He corrected both of those situations. There was plenty of talent there and it was set up for 2023. Braun held serve.
Fitz hired a solid DC to replace JON.
Exactly. And he and Jake brought in a solid QB. Plus many of the key guys were more seasoned. The team was ready to rock and roll. Braun gets (and deserves) a lot of credit for keeping them together and holding serve but he did not build that team and right now he is finding out how difficult that part of the job is.
I think we are in the right conference. We should be blowing by ACC teams in another year or so. And I imagine that the P2 will have more attention from the media and recruiting sites. Which will help us, vandy, etc.
Maybe Im wrong but Im thinking we start creeping in the top 50 with Braun. Hopefully Braun succeeds but Im also thinking it will no longer be acceptable, by NU Admin, to have awful finishes. While I think we. can achieve 6 wins this year, I couldnt imagine Braun sticking around with another awful year like last year. Never mind, with the changing ncaa landscape, almost any coach would want to coach in a P2 program.
It remains relevant in light of current recruiting issues, but you do you.
I guess this is off limits again. Didn’t seen like it was getting nasty. I don’t get it when it is the single biggest contributor to what we see happening on the field and on the recruiting trail. Draconian rules.
Just to be clear, I don't have an issue with mentions of the hazing issue being tied to recruiting problems, but we don't need to relitigate the whole thing from 2 years ago, whether it happened, what happened, etc.
My apologies. You are right, we have a season in front of us and much to talk about.
@CappyNU just to clarify, if a bunch of Fitz-turd acolytes want to build a shrine to him, that's ok, but if I say he belongs in jail, thats not ok?
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