Shama: Gophers are a developmental program with a roster that has no five-star and few four-star players coming out of high school.

Donate To GopherHole
This time of year you can see why players want to play in the south.
 

Bob_Loblaw said:
If only we would have had him instead of those bums Ko Kieft and BSF, we would have won the Big 10. Good point.
Click to expand...
Ko Kieft was a long time NDSU commit. Gophers offered him and I forget, either 24 or 48 hours later he was a gopher commit.

Trey Lance, if you believe him, said he'd have committed to Mn if PJ offered him at QB ( although worked out for him. Doubt he gets drafted #2 as a gopher. Would've avoided bust label but few million poorer)


And I'm still waiting for another kid that had a gopher scholarship offer that ended up at ndsu (to my knowledge he listed the only one ever).
 

It is a complex issue. There are other programs that have some of the same issues and still succeed. Take University of Cincinnati. Pretty successful lately. No 5 stars. City campus. Death Star program 100 miles to the North and SEC 100 (KY) miles to the south. It can be done. The one advantage (often understated) is that UC recruits a lot of Cincinnati 3 stars. Generally tough kids who play in the ultra competitive Cincinnati area leagues. Mark Dantonio recruited a lot of these kids to MSU and was very successful. Minnesota needs to find such an area (Chicago Catholic leagues?) and dominate recruiting there. As far as pretty campus and college town IU has all of that and they historically suck at football.
 

The Gophers are butting up against shifting dynamics.

The Gophers graduated many well-seasoned players that they couldn't entirely replace with plug-in-and-play players. As developmental players, many are not ready to contribute at the same level as their predecessors. Losing Chris Autman Bell for the season hurts. We are missing the players that are playing in the NFL now.

The WR and RT positions are not at the level that we expected. Is it talent, lack of will, injuries, or development level?

PJ Fleck got his hands full with Purdue and Illinois. He got out-coached. IMHO, both opponents had better complimentary talent. The Gophers coaching staff needs to make adjustments against the exposed RPO antidote. The Big Ten West as a division is better overall. The margin of error for victory is getting thinner.

The price of admission to the upper tier Big Ten West is better recruiting. They cannot rely on internal talent development alone. The Transfer Portal is high-risk, high-reward.

Relying primarily on developmental players opens PJ Fleck to longer zig cycles if we want to use his Zig-zag chart analogy. By the time these players are ready, the other pieces graduate. Time and on-demand talent are everything.

They need legitimate blue-chip players. I don't care if they come in as three-star or four-star players.

Let's not panic. The season is not over yet.

They have to focus on constantly improving. They will carry that into next season. The Gophers football program is in better shape than before.
 




Laker said:
It is a complex issue. There are other programs that have some of the same issues and still succeed. Take University of Cincinnati. Pretty successful lately. No 5 stars. City campus. Death Star program 100 miles to the North and SEC 100 (KY) miles to the south. It can be done. The one advantage (often understated) is that UC recruits a lot of Cincinnati 3 stars. Generally tough kids who play in the ultra competitive Cincinnati area leagues. Mark Dantonio recruited a lot of these kids to MSU and was very successful. Minnesota needs to find such an area (Chicago Catholic leagues?) and dominate recruiting there. As far as pretty campus and college town IU has all of that and they historically suck at football.
Click to expand...
The other schools I usually compare to the U are Washington and Pitt. Both have, in recent years, been more successful than Minnesota. It can be done.
 





Otis said:
Mpls is my favorite town so don’t get me wrong when I throw some January Minnetonka lake water at you.

1. Mpls is a shithole compared to what it was prior to George Floyd. Downtown is pretty sparsely filled and the crime is way too high. South Mpls is pretty much a free for all.

2. Minnesota is cold as crap! Kids can go anywhere. Why freeze?

3. There is very old history but negative football legacy is a tough sell. Thank God for Fleck who is getting guys into the pros! He is slowly fixing this point.

4. Minnesota is pretty tough to get into, even General College.

5. Some people don’t like a city school and want to be where the town exists strictly because of the school. Combine this with #1 and you eliminate a lot of kids right away.

6. Lack of SEC level ravenous fans. Minnesotans don’t live and die Gophers. There’s lots of other things to do and we are several generations removed from Gopher football really mattering. It’s a more fun environment elsewhere.

There’s tons of things to do which make the Twin Cities Awesome! But you can find fun in lots of places where there is better football and more opportunity.

We gotta win consistently to establish a school known for football to get 4 and 5 star players. The question is how long?

Wisconsin has sustained winning for 20+ years it seems like and they still can’t get more than 3 4* players in a single class while OSU gets at least 12 every year. Until the football budget is equivalent to OSU, Michigan and PSU, we won’t get the blue blood players no matter how many games we win.

Basketball has a way better shot where it only takes a few to have a historic season.
Click to expand...

1) South Minneapolis east of Minnehaha and most of it that is west of 35 still feels pretty safe to me. Between 35 and Minnehaha below about 42nd St. is still mostly all right too.

2) True. I think a fair number of people who post on this board don't quite get that. My guess is that at least 60% of the US population would never want to live in this climate. If you live here for some time, you adjust to it but this would be a daunting place for a potential newbie.

3) I agree that Fleck is improving the perception of Minnesota players to the NFL. I didn't become a Gopher football fan until about 10 years ago. At that time, I looked up active NFL players from U of M. Minnesota had the lowest number of any school in the Big Ten (including Northwestern and Indiana). Having 11 drafted in the last three years is a big selling point.

4) No opinion about the strength of that effect

5) I think that's probably true. There is something to be said about a traditional college town atmosphere if you're going to be a big man on campus.

6) That is true but, personally, I think that's a positive. You could say the same thing about Los Angeles and Seattle. I doubt the residents of those metros wish the population would be more football centric like they are in Tuscaloosa.

I wouldn't worry too much about getting 5 star players. I've found that ratings of football players coming out of high school are fairly unreliable relative to the ratings of basketball players. I remember Lou Holtz saying some years back that a surprisingly high percentage of 5 star players never earned a letter. Recently I read an article reviewing the history of Iowa's five star recruits under Ferentz. Although those were major recruiting stars by Iowa's standards, only about half of them worked out very well even in college. In recent years, Northwestern has recruited two former five star quarterbacks as transfers. Neither one of them has performed as well as Tanner.

Since 247 started compiling these high school rankings, Minnesota has not had any five star recruits but here are there highest ranking four stars:

1) Jeff Jones
2) Carter Coughlin
3) Hayo Carpenter
4) Clint Brewster
5) Alex Daniels
6) Moses Alipate
7) Curtis Dunlap

Only #2 had a truly fine career here. #7 started out pretty well but wasn't starting by his last year here and transferred to Rutgers. The rest of them either did nothing or not much here.

With the transfer portal, getting really high prep recruits is less important anyway. Would anyone have preferred any of those players listed above, other than Coughlin, to Jack Gibbens? Jack Gibbens didn't receive a single FBS offer coming out of high school.
 
Last edited:


Geography is destiny.
Demography is destiny.
Black people are a significant plurality in the South but are still a minority but they make up a great majority of the starting players in the SEC.
White young men are not playing football in the same percentages as they did years ago, many areas of the midwest are seeing a significant decrease in young people, and look at the make up of men's high school soccer teams today.
Many those young men would be playing football years ago.
It is not only the climate that makes recruiting more difficult in MN, WI, IA, etc.
 




disco said:
The other schools I usually compare to the U are Washington and Pitt. Both have, in recent years, been more successful than Minnesota. It can be done.
Click to expand...
I think Gophers are equal to or in better shape than UWash and similar to Pitt. PJ Fleck has done a good job elevating and bringing consistency to the program (last year and a couple of tough losses this year don't change that). Recall Jimmy Lake didn't work out at Washington, and while they seem like they have a winner in DeBoer, he's just getting started. Pat Narduzzi has brought Pitt back, but I'd suggest PJ is viewed similarly.
 

hungan1 said:
The Transfer Portal is high-risk, high-reward.
Click to expand...

I don't agree with that at all. Transfer portal recruiting is much lower risk than prep recruiting. These are much more mature players who have shown already that they can play at least at an acceptable level. Some of our transfer portal players in the last two classes have played at an above-average to high level and most of the rest are at least playing.
 

dlnavra said:
Pat Narduzzi has brought Pitt back, but I'd suggest PJ is viewed similarly.
Click to expand...

I'd say that Narduzzi and Fleck have similar records at their respective schools although Narduzzi's tenure has been longer. Pitt also plays in the ACC which benefits its teams overall records by having only 8 conference games. I also believe the ACC is a weaker conference than the Big Ten. The ACC is 6-17 in its bowl games over the last three years. They're 2-4 in bowl games against Big Ten teams during that time. One of those victories was by Clemson (over OSU). The other was by Wake Forest playing 5-7 Rutgers as a replacement team in last year's Gator Bowl.
 

FWIW - 247 had the Gophers 2022 class ranked 49th overall and 14th in the B1G. There were other services that had the Gophers ranked lower nationally.

It's fine to say that the Gophers are a developmental program. But with rankings like that, they are starting at a disadvantage.

And - the Gophers have lost some assistant coaches who were considered among their better recruiters, including Chad Wilt. that has to be taken into consideration, because who is doing the recruiting can be just as important as who is being recruited.
 

cjbfbp said:
I'd say that Narduzzi and Fleck have similar records at their respective schools although Narduzzi's tenure has been longer. Pitt also plays in the ACC which benefits its teams overall records by having only 8 conference games. I also believe the ACC is a weaker conference than the Big Ten. The ACC is 6-17 in its bowl games over the last three years. They're 2-4 in bowl games against Big Ten teams during that time. One of those victories was by Clemson (over OSU). The other was by Wake Forest playing 5-7 Rutgers as a replacement team in last year's Gator Bowl.
Click to expand...
PJ was recruited to coach in the BIG so comparing his conference record a coach in a different conference would not be valid.
By comparison to the coaches that preceded PJ in recent memory from Holtz forward, it is fair to say PJ generated far more sustained excitement about the program than prior coaches except for Holtz who left after a couple of years and was a bit of a psycho.
If that excitement plays out to an acceptable number of conference victories is for the MN AD to decide.
There will be no more divisions after USC and UCLA join so it will be just how MN compares to the whole conference, not just the West.
 

Plato said:
PJ was recruited to coach in the BIG so comparing his conference record a coach in a different conference would not be valid.
Click to expand...

Well, thanks for your input but I'm fine making that comparison just the same.
 

hungan1 said:
The Gophers are butting up against shifting dynamics.

The Gophers graduated many well-seasoned players that they couldn't entirely replace with plug-in-and-play players. As developmental players, many are not ready to contribute at the same level as their predecessors. Losing Chris Autman Bell for the season hurts. We are missing the players that are playing in the NFL now.

The WR and RT positions are not at the level that we expected. Is it talent, lack of will, injuries, or development level?

PJ Fleck got his hands full with Purdue and Illinois. He got out-coached. IMHO, both opponents had better complimentary talent. The Gophers coaching staff needs to make adjustments against the exposed RPO antidote. The Big Ten West as a division is better overall. The margin of error for victory is getting thinner.

The price of admission to the upper tier Big Ten West is better recruiting. They cannot rely on internal talent development alone. The Transfer Portal is high-risk, high-reward.

Relying primarily on developmental players opens PJ Fleck to longer zig cycles if we want to use his Zig-zag chart analogy. By the time these players are ready, the other pieces graduate. Time and on-demand talent are everything.

They need legitimate blue-chip players. I don't care if they come in as three-star or four-star players.

Let's not panic. The season is not over yet.

They have to focus on constantly improving. They will carry that into next season. The Gophers football program is in better shape than before.
Click to expand...
You want legitimate blue chip players but you don't care if they are three or four star players? No three star and few four star players out of high school are considered blue chip recruits. If they turn out to be blue chip players it means they were probably mis-rated or really well developed.

Our talent level is not different from either Purdue or Illinois. I think we are a little better than Purdue other than lack of purpose and poor coaching the day we played.

Charlie Jones would never have seen an NFL training camp had he stayed at Iowa. Brohm put him in an offense that will make him a relatively high draft pick.
 

You must log in or register to reply here.



Top Bottom