Let's hope something changes, because if not, 3 years from now we are going to be in even deeper of a hole than we are now. What that something will be I don't know - how do you turn Coach Kill into Mack Brown or Nich Saban?
Well now, that's a little over dramatic, isn't it? Coach Kill doesn't have to be Mack Brown or Nick Saban, and in reality very few coaches are able to recruit like those two can.
I keep thinking of the Joe Tiller hire at Purdue. Prior to landing the Boiler gig, he'd been a pretty good head coach at Wyoming for all of six years with fairly middling results (3 losing seasons, 3 winning seasons culminating in the 10-2 season that got him the job at Purdue). In my opinion Kill has proven himself over a much longer period of time and in a much more diverse variety of circumstances, but anyway back to the point, he and Kill are very similar in that both are very low-key individuals, neither have what could even remotely be described as magnetic personalities, and there were the same doubts about Tiller at Purdue..."How on earth is this guy EVER going to bring recruits in here????", and the truth is he didn't initially hit out of the park home runs with his recruiting class rankings, in fact he never did and never could compete with the likes of Michigan or Ohio State. That's just the way of the world, and you make the best with what you're realistically able to get.
So he brought in average classes at best, but what the guy DID have going for him was a concrete philosophy and a plan, and a scheme to which he could fit players into that could allow his team to be competitive and to win big in the Big Ten. In other words, he coached them up. He found players that could fit his schemes, he brought them in and he maximized their abilities, and then of course success feeds upon itself and winning brought him in even higher quality of recruits despite his low-key demeanor and less than magnetic personality and the fact that he was coaching at Purdue.
So recruiting is just one part of the equation. Schemes, an idea, a foundation and a plan along with the ability to teach players how to play the game and how to maximize their skills while able to meld them to your schemes, those things are huge. That's how Tiller found success, that's how Kill has found success to this point in his career, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that he cannot continue on with that.
This 'woe is us, we're doomed' stuff is just over the top in my opinion.
