Looking at the lower ranked commits, 3 are seemingly corners
- Thread starter epicbret
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We have two corner commits, Fussell and Shivers. Lewis and Walters are safeties.
The issue is that QB and WR are also amongst our lowest-rated/recruited positions and we haven’t exactly been killing it there for a while now.
Thorson committed as part of the class of 2014 and Ramsey was a one-year stop-gap because our HS QB recruiting since Thorson has been pretty… um… pedestrian: Lloyd Yates, Aidan Smith, Andrew Marty, Jason Whittaker, [nobody], Carl Richardson, Brendan Sullivan, Jack Lausch, and Aidan Gray. Not a highly-recruited kid in the bunch.
WOW ... that list is both sobering and sad for a program that has had the likes of Schnur, Kustok, Basanez, Persa, Kafka, Colter, Siemian and Thorson. Plus a couple of 4 and 5 star highly sought after recruiting gems that didn't/haven't panned out.
Hoping Sully exceeds expectations and rights the ship.
GOUNUII
Almost all of these guys were offered and taken late, apparently as second or third choices after our top choices in those years spurned NU for other offers. Gray, however was clearly a top choice among our coaches, committing very early. The coaches also appear to be quite high on both Sullivan and Lausch, though both of them were offered later in the recruiting process. I expect Sullivan to play this year, whether as a starter or as a change of pace from Hilinski.
Also, different sites rank our guys differently. ESPN and 247 have some as 4* that Rivals does not.
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Yes Gray was an early offer this year, but that honestly feels like a reaction to missing out on so many guys for so many years. Take the local guy who is pretty good, don’t risk missing out on higher-profile/higher-recruited guys and get left holding the bag.
Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s fine as a prospect… but that’s it. Much closer to ”more of the same” than “difference maker.” He could well have gotten more offers during the evaluation period had he not committed to NU, but I doubt it would have been blue chip programs. Had only MAC offers at the time he committed (which is pretty much the same as Sullivan, FWIW… he had MACs plus Indiana… and we all know Lausch had only the PWO football offer from ND).
Whittaker committed to NU in December of his junior year, and was a tight end by his sophomore year.
Yuck!
Ah, I thought Lewis was playing outside.
I am really excited about Walters. Terrific prep at a solid program.
And to your last point, yes, but I am trying to feel GOOD and ENJOY this.
I'm thinking slash hoping that Sullivan can be the solution this upcoming season. Let's go Brendan!!
Ramsey was a grad transfer stopgap so not a HS recruit. And Thorson was in what? 2014? That is forever ago. We really have not had anything to speak of since in HS recruiting. We did get a couple transfers but so far they have not played out
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This is an impressive list, even after leaving out CJ Bacher, who still owns the single season NU record for passing yards with 3,656 in 2007 and is fourth all time in passing yards behind Thorson, Basanez, and Len Williams.
Whittaker was the biggest head scratcher of the bunch. If I recall correctly, he played in like the Wing T, and threw something ridiculous like 12 passes his entire junior year. I would have been shocked had he panned out at QB. He was a relatively early offer/commit too if I recall correctly - we offered him in camp. Unlike guys like Sullivan, Richardson, and Lausch who were clearly late offers only after we missed on our A and B list candidates.
This is what happens when your offense (particularly the passing side of things) gets worse year by year and you have no imaginative play calling or willingness to air it out. We were able to recruit solid to great QB talent under Mike Dunbar, and in McCall's early years (where our offenses benefitted in part to solid talent recruited to play for Dunbar) because kids wanted to put up big numbers. Great QBs don't want to run and hand off the ball. WR's would rather make plays catching the ball and going downfield then blocking most of the time and catching bubble screens and 2 yard dumps. As time went on, our offense became more and more stagnant, less and less pass happy. Gone are the days of Basanez and Bacher and Kafka and Persa when we would throw up to 60% of the time and our offense was consistently top half and even top 3 in the conference. Kafka threw 78 times for 532 yards in the bowl against Auburn. Bacher had 990 yards and 9 passing TDs in the most amazing two consecutive games ever by an NU QB against MSU and Minnesota. Did any of QBs pass for 9 TDs all season? Did all of our QBs combined even match that number (I'm too lazy to look it up)? When's the last time an NU QB had a 300 yard passing game? Now we are lucky if we aren't bottom 2 or 3 or even dead last. Thorson also had a stranglehold on the position for 4 years, which didn't help things, but most programs can overcome that sort of thing. For some reason, we did not. But, even under Thorson, our offense became more and more mediocre. Weak OL recruiting and development resulting in a complete lack of protection certainly did not help (I still wonder what Hunter Johnson might have done for us if he had great protection and wasn't playing deer in the headlights and running for his life all the time - see Michigan State when the defense laid back). And so is it a surprise that we haven't been able to recruit solid WR and QB talent, when our pass offense looks like it has over recent years?
Clear improvements with our OL under Anderson hopefully are a good start to fix some things. Give our QBs and WRs a little more time to make a play. Unfortunately the play calling under Bajakian doesn't seem to have changed things up much. The offense is still stale, unimaginative, and downright less than mediocre. Maybe as Corbi has said, Fitz is the problem, not the OC. And now, we don't have Mike Hankwitz and a top notch D to mask the problems on the offensive side of the ball to let us get away with it. Either way, we're still way below average as an offense, and until we show recruits that this is going to be a pass-friendly offense that can showcase their talents, it will be a struggle to bring in top caliber players when they can go somewhere else where the offense is more attractive, they can put up big numbers, and get noticed and boost their chances to land somewhere in the league (can you really blame Ben Skowronek?). Ironically, in a perverse way, one could argue that playing for NU prepares you better for the league because your WRs aren't going to always be getting separation and you're going to have to learn to play with less than 1.5 seconds to get rid of the ball, but I guess that's not how it works. Bottom line is we have a chicken and egg problem. Until we can show a prolific pass happy offense, we're kind of stuck. The paradox is that we need QB and WR talent to emerge to make that happen, but the playcalling and offensive scheme is probably a bigger factor IMO. One of our guys will be a diamond in the rough and be able to blow it up if given the chance. But, that ain't gonna happen if we run the ball every 1st down and play to get to 3rd and short all the time.
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Fitz loves "complementary" football. Unfortunately, our seasons in 2019 and 2021 got cratered by this approach.
Fitz needs to drop the Woody Hayes 3 yards and a cloud of dust act and get with the program. No longer able to be saved by the genius of Mike Hankwitz notwithstanding, this approach is simply obsolete in today's game.
Nick Saban figured out that even at Alabama, your D still needs an offense that can put some points on the board.
Real complementary football is when you have a D that keeps teams from scoring and a high powered offense that puts up loads of points on the board.
And we won the West the other two seasons. And Iowa won the West last year playing the same style. Jimmys and Joes...
^ Only to get blasted by the winner from the East.
Same goes for Wisky in the times they won the West.
If the B1G does away with divisions, then sticking to a "conservative" O will pretty mean never being a contender.
And having a "high-powered" O doesn't mean not being "complementary" or having a greater risk of TOs.
Look at the TD/TO ratio for programs like Bama, UGA, dOSU, OU, etc.
Heck of a lot better than what the Cats have been trotting out.
Same goes for Wisky in the times they won the West.
If the B1G does away with divisions, then sticking to a "conservative" O will pretty mean never being a contender.
And having a "high-powered" O doesn't mean not being "complementary" or having a greater risk of TOs.
Look at the TD/TO ratio for programs like Bama, UGA, dOSU, OU, etc.
Heck of a lot better than what the Cats have been trotting out.
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