I see they are ranked in the top 10. How are they getting top recruits? They haven't been at the top of the SEC type program for a while. What can they sell that UK can't?
How does TN recruit so well?
- Thread starter maysvilleky
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Multiple SEC and national championships. A focus on football. History and legacy. Putting a huge number of players in the NFL including all-timers like Reggie White and Peyton Manning. 100,000+ stadium that is full for every game. Off the chart facilities and support for athletes. Expectations.
Because they love football there the way the fans(most) of the fans do basketball here...Go to a game there and you will see...Went to all the road games except Fla this year and ut the best game atmosphere of all of them
Well, first off, Tennessee as a program has been extremely successful for many many years. Secondly, they have put a ton of money into their athletics, mostly football, and have built some of the best facilities in the entire nation. Thirdly, they have some great fans that make for a great atmosphere that recruits love. Fourthly, they are currently benefiting from the fact that the state of Tennessee is producing high quality prospects at a record (for them) pace. In the two major HS all star games this year TN had 7 guys. Last year in Tennessee alone UT picked up 7 4 and 5 star recruits, two were 5 stars, and another two guys that were 3 stars. Rivals has Tennessee as having 30 top players. Of those 30 13 of them are 4 and 5 stars. Compare that to Kentucky, who has just 5 top players and 2 that are 4 and 5 stars. So, they can recruit their own state and pull in a handful of guys and end up with more 4 and 5 star guys than Kentucky can in an entire class. This has definitely helped to bolster their recruiting. Jones really stepped into a right place right time type scenario.
Kentucky has a long way to go before we can compete with Tennessee. Our facilities are behind, our tradition is behind, our fans are behind, and the state as a whole is behind. Living in Tennessee... it's not something I'm a big fan of. lol
Despite the love they're currently getting, they ended the season losing 6 of their last 9. They demolished UK in a game that UK decided not to compete in then promptly lost at home to Missouri before struggling to beat the worst team in the SEC that got them in a bowl, they're first in 4-5 years, where they drew probably the weakest opponent out of a P-5 conference. They recruited well over the last decade but they program was in decline mainly due to poor coaching hires. It will be interesting to see if they can maintain it.
The problem for UK was that while UT was in decline UK was far worse. Stoops has a big mountain to climb but he's got to get out of a huge hole first before he can start climbing that mountain.
The problem for UK was that while UT was in decline UK was far worse. Stoops has a big mountain to climb but he's got to get out of a huge hole first before he can start climbing that mountain.
This.
To be fair though, UT is a women's basketball school and everyone knows this, especially redneck UT fans.
History, legacy, huge stadium and a very good coach. They fill the stadium up with Butch Jones. A Tenn. guy ask me the other day if I thought Ky. would go undefeated in basketball so I named a couple of game's that would be close, he said u know they play Tenn. too I said I'm not worried about that game and he said Merry Christmas to u to, but I told him I didn't mean it that way. He is the only one, every one else is either football or women's BB that's their passion.
They spend bank on football...
Neyland Stadium at capacity...is pretty enticing for a young kid...
History and tradition still carry a lot of weight, especially with talent in the south...
Good representation in the NFL...Peyton, Arian Foster, Jerod Mayo, Robert Meachem, Colquitt brothers, Eric Berry, Jason Witten...
Location...North and South Carolina talent is within reach...quick trip down 75 to the Georgia talent...good in state talent that they have first dibs on....
Neyland Stadium at capacity...is pretty enticing for a young kid...
History and tradition still carry a lot of weight, especially with talent in the south...
Good representation in the NFL...Peyton, Arian Foster, Jerod Mayo, Robert Meachem, Colquitt brothers, Eric Berry, Jason Witten...
Location...North and South Carolina talent is within reach...quick trip down 75 to the Georgia talent...good in state talent that they have first dibs on....
Tennessee state talent >>>>>>>>>>>>> Kentucky state talent, and there's more talented players in Tennessee. Moreover, Tennessee is not recruiting against anyone in the state; if a five-star goes to a different school, it does not hurt them as badly as when H****s committed to Alabama. They are 215 miles from Atlanta. That's closer than they are to Memphis, and not much further than they are from Nashville. Texas gets loads of talent from the Metroplex, which is about the same distance from campus; Florida State recruits all over Florida; in some cases, are more than 250 miles away. They are not too far from Birmingham, either (a little more than 250 miles), although there are two schools who get first dibs there.
What sucks is UK had a chance to compete with UT this season while they were down a little bit and while they wont be at the top of the SEC next year they will win about 8-9 games next season and it will be another 25 years before we beat them again. Maybe the most disappointing, lack of effort games by UK all season was against UT.
FALSE Not true at all. Most UT fans could give two shits about womens basketball, especially now the Pat is gone.
They are a football school. We are a basketball school.
About the time Joker took over the HC job UK's recruiting budget with all the handicaps football had for more than 25 recruits was barely over $300K.
But UK's recruiting budget for the same year for basketball with all its tradition and facilities (best in the nation) for four or five recruits was over $500K. Fact.
That was also about the time the SEC distribution jumped about $5,000,000 per school, with the new TV contract, which was almost entirely due to football, AND the football program showed a operating profit of about $18,000,000 while basketball showed a profit of less than $6,000,000.
But mitch couldn't afford to replace the folding chairs in the disgusting "recruiting room" for football. Right.
The facts are what are impressive-----and depressing.
Hey, I will have to give mitch a super great AAA rating for being lucky, either that or having to change, Cal (could have been here instead of BCG) and Stoops are definitely great choices, Cal said he always wanted the job and Stoops had a plan that he sold and the ability to implement it.
But don't kid yourself, finally treating UK football as something other than the ugly stepchild has a lot to do with the turnaround also.
Hey, I will have to give mitch a super great AAA rating for being lucky, either that or having to change, Cal (could have been here instead of BCG) and Stoops are definitely great choices, Cal said he always wanted the job and Stoops had a plan that he sold and the ability to implement it.
But don't kid yourself, finally treating UK football as something other than the ugly stepchild has a lot to do with the turnaround also.
That's a lot of qualifying a team that won four of its last five games, including a bowl, with only three senior starters but six freshmen and five sophomores.
Actually their record is "worse" (from our point of view) than mr schwump (think that is the correct name, not his real name) states, in the last nine games of the regular season they were 4 and 5, if you include the bowl game they were 5 and 4, and if you only consider the last eight games including the bowl game they were 5 and 3.
And sadly, SaguaraCat is correct, and their schedule and bowl game gave them a chance to build some momentum, the wins over UK, Vandy and Iowa weren't that impressive to me, beating USC away by three points was fairly impressive, but then we beat them and Vandy also.
This post was edited on 1/16 12:37 AM by jauk11
While Tenn. made some mistakes in coaching hires. The coach's they did hire wasn't near as bad as Joker. Lane Kiffin was a guy their AD should of known was never going to stay at Tenn. but while he was there he recruited on a pretty high level. Dooley was not a good X's and O's guy but again he recruited some decent players. Some jumped ship when it became obvious he wasn't going to make it at Tenn. but he was still outdoing Joker. Joker completely destroyed what Rich Brooks got started here and most of what he did to our program he did not as head coach but as the associate head coach/recruiting coordinator. Then as head coach recruiting fell off the table. He took players who looked good on paper but other coach's new they where unlikely to play either because of injuries or academics. Randall Cobb was a 2 star player out of Tenn. and in my opinion that ruined Jokers mind set. He thought he could take more of those and whip them into 4 or 5 star players. He couldn't ! After he became head coach he hired a lead recruiter in Tee Martin who alot of people thought was a great recruiter but if he was working for me I would of fired. Look he went on KSR and actually said that he lied to recruits and that he didn't bring recruits to campus because we lacked all the pretty bells and whistles,which might of been true but you don't go on record as to why it's hard to recruit here. I firmly believe that had Mark Stoops been hired after say the 07 season Ky would now be a consistent top 20 team.
Football is everything to the people of Tn. They have 1 championship back in 98 but their fans think they are Bama. They also have always been shady but NCAA has turned their heads. They should have had heavy sanctions when Kiffen was here and got a slap on the wrist.
Often people like to say "what have they done lately" when talking about some programs.....Michigan, Tennessee, Texas, etc.....saying they haven't been relevant lately so why can they be relevant again. Every program has ups/downs. Bama certainly is on a high now but 10-15 yrs ago they were low. This goes for most schools. This happens in conferences too. The BigTEN (despite the NC game this yr) is way down as a whole when it used to be one of the best conferences not too long ago. There is one thing that remains relatively constant though. The rich tend to stay rich. The top programs will emerge from their lows. Same with the conferences. UT is a top 25 program historically and it will rise again.
That's what makes UK's climb that much harder. We don't have the history. And what little success we have is short lived. In order to make UK a decent program we need to have good success and do it for a decade or two.....or three.
That's what makes UK's climb that much harder. We don't have the history. And what little success we have is short lived. In order to make UK a decent program we need to have good success and do it for a decade or two.....or three.
When are people going to learn that the recruiting budget argument is complete and utter BULLSHIT. Our staffs under Mitch have never had a cap on what they could spend in recruiting EVER. UK has always had to recruit regionally because our football program isn't a national brand. Tennessee, Michigan, USC, and OSU have a history of recruiting the entire country for players. Under Brooks/Joker a majority of our players came for Georgia and under Stoops +50% of our players come from Ohio or Kentucky. A person with very limited knowledge of geography and travel expenses can put 2 and 2 together and figure out that flying assistants cross country in jets is exponentially more expensive than routine road trips that are 7 hours or less in most cases. If our coaches thought their time would be well spent flying to Texas and Cali they would do that and money wouldn't stop them from being able to. Some have an axe to grind so they'll just make crap up to fit their agenda
Your Barnhart/Joker spin is getting really tired.
It was relevant 5 years ago and I agreed with most of it but those days are gone. You can't complain about the comittment to football today. Money is not the problem. Tradition, youth and on field performance are. The money has been there for stadium updates, a new training facility, Stoop's raise, Morrow's raise and recruitung as well. Mitch has made the investment but it will take some more time to see a return. Its not the lottery. When we start winning on the field, Stoops will need more money to travel farther to see more recruits. It will be at his disposal. For now, the ball is in his court...or maybe I should say on his end of the field.
Largely due to having a traditional power name and spending boatloads of money on new facilities despite the fact that the athletic department was $2 million dollars in debt two years ago.
LOL, the money was always there if they had spent the money football earned on football, sorry it just bothers me to see mitch made out to be a hero after he did the bare minimum for football for over a decade, and only corrected his course of action when he was forced to.
I didn't know I mentioned Joker, but if you think Brooks or him either one had the support they needed to stay competitive in the best conference in America with most of the other schools fully committed to the arms race you are being silly. Averaging ONE four star commit per season and NINETEEN two stars that averaged about a 5.2 in 07 after our third break even season in the SEC in three decades says they weren't getting the support they needed.
I give mitch credit for being a very lucky man in most cases, and I am glad for where we are at except we should be about four or five years farther down the road than we are now, and the fans should never have had to go through what they had to, including the ones that sacrificed tickets in the family for generations.
Did you even ever see the picture of our "recruiting room" that was in use during mitch's entire reign, I'm sure all the recruits we were competing with against SEC coaches did. Too bad we couldn't have borrowed Bishop Gorman's high school "recruiting room" for those recruits, probably would have made a completely different statement about whether UK was just a "basketball" school or not.
When posters stop making mitch out to be a hero I will try to stop posting the FACTS in the matter, I agree it is probably best forgotten.
Go Stoops and Troops.
This post was edited on 1/16 4:36 PM by jauk11
Originally posted by Shavers48:
Maybe it's how they decide to allocate their resources.
Amazing link, didn't copy to here, see it in his post just above. And I guess it was all legal.
I already knew that UK spent more on Midnight Madness than they did on the football recruiting budget, up until recently (hopefully), now this. Really impressive, and probably it will end up being money well spent, just like more money spent on football in the past would have been money well spent, after all, it was bringing in a lot more than basketball even with teams that struggled to break even in the SEC-----or after a while that failed to win a single game two years in a row-----even with our new coaches. Of course it did result in a complete breakdown of football, but oh well.
Funny that Brooks was a genius at Oregon with his coach in waiting, and a dunce for wanting to promote a coach he gave part of his salary to in order to keep him on board at UK. Maybe the impetus to Oregon's rise to NC games was an article I read about ONE recruiting weekend, in 2005 IIRC, where they spent $6,000 PER RECRUIT for one weekend when they brought in 25 top recruits from all over the country, a total of $156,000 for the couple of days. Chartered planes, limousines, steak and lobster, it caused quite a few changes in the NCAA recruiting guidelines, AND resulted in commits from over half of the 25 recruits.
Good business managers invest in the thing that is making them money, UK didn't until forced to, pretty sure it will prove to be a wise investment.
mitch was penny wise and pound foolish with football until forced to change.
PS: Just caught the end of a discussion of the money spent on the trip on Round the Horn, seemed to think it was worth the money and legal, but I didn't see much of it. It certainly will be worth the money in actual cash income if UK wins another NC.
This post was edited on 1/16 3:23 PM by jauk11
Maybe it's how they decide to allocate their resources.
Amazing link, didn't copy to here, see it in his post just above. And I guess it was all legal.
I already knew that UK spent more on Midnight Madness than they did on the football recruiting budget, up until recently (hopefully), now this. Really impressive, and probably it will end up being money well spent, just like more money spent on football in the past would have been money well spent, after all, it was bringing in a lot more than basketball even with teams that struggled to break even in the SEC-----or after a while that failed to win a single game two years in a row-----even with our new coaches. Of course it did result in a complete breakdown of football, but oh well.
Funny that Brooks was a genius at Oregon with his coach in waiting, and a dunce for wanting to promote a coach he gave part of his salary to in order to keep him on board at UK. Maybe the impetus to Oregon's rise to NC games was an article I read about ONE recruiting weekend, in 2005 IIRC, where they spent $6,000 PER RECRUIT for one weekend when they brought in 25 top recruits from all over the country, a total of $156,000 for the couple of days. Chartered planes, limousines, steak and lobster, it caused quite a few changes in the NCAA recruiting guidelines, AND resulted in commits from over half of the 25 recruits.
Good business managers invest in the thing that is making them money, UK didn't until forced to, pretty sure it will prove to be a wise investment.
mitch was penny wise and pound foolish with football until forced to change.
PS: Just caught the end of a discussion of the money spent on the trip on Round the Horn, seemed to think it was worth the money and legal, but I didn't see much of it. It certainly will be worth the money in actual cash income if UK wins another NC.
This post was edited on 1/16 3:23 PM by jauk11
While everyone is talking about the Vols, I'll just take this moment to repeat my life-long philosophy of UK football struggles which is this:
Until our athletic department's leadership decides to make the ability to compete against the University of Tennessee the #1, SINGLE, front-burner priority, then UK Football will continue to struggle to be anything more than what it has been over the past 3-1/2 decades.
that is all
This post was edited on 1/18 8:34 PM by KopiKat
Until our athletic department's leadership decides to make the ability to compete against the University of Tennessee the #1, SINGLE, front-burner priority, then UK Football will continue to struggle to be anything more than what it has been over the past 3-1/2 decades.
that is all
This post was edited on 1/18 8:34 PM by KopiKat
It is a philosophical approach toward a desired outcome. Similar techniques have been applied successfully through the centuries by man in pursuit of various conquests. In this case, that would be to quit denying who one's true foe really is, where one's true battlegrounds really are, and so forth and so on. In recent years our fan base has been so caught up in the drama of Louisville. Great. Let's just say we get back to where we're beating them more than half the time. So what then?
Life in the SEC. Live it or die in it. A few examples as answers to your question I suppose can come in the form of recruits, such as that Stocker (think that was his name) kid from Berea that played for UT a few years ago instead of for the in-state SEC school single county away, and then also the clear disparity between offensive line depth year in and year out compared to UT (as well as other SEC programs), and then the fact that almost never does UT find itself want for playmakers on either side of the ball.
I suppose a lot of these considerations depend on what part of Kentucky one comes from. For me and others like me, it makes no sense that anybody other than Tennessee became our main rival in football. That it has happened is evidence of failure. It is generally accepted that Kentucky is not a football state and so as an SEC program our biggest rival does not need to be in it. I couldn't care less about Louisville. I dream of a winning record in the SEC. While Louisville remains more important than Knoxville sub-mediocrity will remain as-is.
This post was edited on 1/18 10:28 PM by KopiKat
Why couldn't they have done at least a FEW of the things they ARE doing currently years ago? The answer: they could have, but chose not to, putting the money that football, THE emerging money sport, (mostly due to TV etc which was obvious to most casual observers but apparently not to our AD), was earning into expanding our basketball program which already had tons of recruiting advantages AND expanding our non-revenue sports. And it is even worse than that, most SEC schools don't make much or any money from basketball, while UK was making about $5,000,000 a year from our program at that time, but at the time women's basketball was losing 2 to 3 million a year, not much choice in women's sports since they are mandated to be supported also.
The frustrating thing IMO is that ANY money they put into football would have MADE more money, and they would have had more money for everything. Why do you think football had millions of dollars in lost revenue in 11 and 12, pretty simple to me, it was on minimum life support for the previous 10 years which not only led to lack of interest but also a concerted and costly strike for more support.
I did the research at the time, Joker's first team in 10 played Florida on the road his first year with a team that had MORE two stars starting than three stars, with a senior class from 07 that had NINETEEN two stars in it, with two walkons starting, while Florida had a TWO DEEP (not just the starters) that AVERAGED above not just a FOUR star, but a 5.9 four star. And a lot of fans thought we should upset them.
We did upset TOBC that year, that had a couple of five stars and THIRTY EIGHT four star commits in the previous four classes while we had TWO four star starters, (and I think one was injured) both JCs from California, one that made THE critical recovery in the playoff game today. In fact seven of the eight SEC teams we faced that year AVERAGED 39 four star commits, minus Vandy but including Ole Miss and MSU, that most of our fans thought we should beat routinely. Do you remember the disgust when MSU's four star Dixon ran all over us when we were supposed to beat them with a couple of four stars while they had over 20 from the previous four classes, and those 20 accentuated a major problem UK had, particularly then, because ALL those four stars were from the state of Mississippi.
There were a lot of reasons for that imbalance of power, and there are lots of reasons we are finally getting players that will give us a chance to compete in the SEC, although we are still far behind.
One of the big ones is that a lot of loyal fans sacrificed tickets in the family for generations so UK lost millions, which woke mitch up from his slumber.
Years back I had one of The Vols greatest All Americans and a many time All Pro player tell me " us players were furnished chewing gum and I chewed a lot"! We became casual friends when I had horses at Fairgounds Race Track in New Orleans.
