You ever notice that the people on here that say "our recruiting is good", never give you a reason why we went 2 and 7 vs the Power 5 teams. All they do is criticize Syracuse and say no players want to come to Syracuse that are 4 or 5 stars. Its too cold (we play in a Dome at 70 degrees) and a bunch of other lame excuses. Its fascinating that they will criticize you but NEVER ever give you a reason for a few 4 and 5 win seasons with one GREAT winning season among them. Hold your head high friend. The majority of fellow Syracuse fans on this site feel the same as you. They just dont post because of thosee those 100 regulars bash them. They do it to me also but Whitman taught me to actually look at facts and come to a logical conclusion based on those facts.
The fact is that our recruiting has been among the worst in the entire P5 with HCDB here at Syracuse. This is by any objective metric. The excuses for our poor recruiting are just those excuses. But here is the kicker. The same people on this site that say "the recruiting is great" will praise a 2star guy with 1 P5 offer and talk about how good he is on tape, celebrate his MAC, AAC and D2 offers. And make excuses why we dont land the BETTER players in some cases on his same team who is a 4 or 5 star and say "stars dont matter" etc etc. Its makes me laugh everytime I see it. Bless them we all want Syracuse to win. Lets hope we get to 7 wins next year with essentially all HCDB players on the roster. No more excuses.
This post is awesome. I won't pretend to speak for those who you are referring to entirely, but let's break down your post:
1) There is no 'objective metric' for recruiting. In fact, I'd argue there is no actual 'metric' for recruiting. Yes, teams are ranked on recruits but those results tend to mirror what we already know -- clemson and alabama will be on top, BC and Syracuse will be on the bottom. This may change if one of those two programs starts winning more but there is next to no predictive value in rankings in terms of seeing teams surprise. And in terms of objectivity, the rankings are based on subjective evaluation of high school prospects by 'experts' who have no more credentials for actually evaluating prospects than you and I. It's simply that it's their job to try and do so.
2) Our recruiting, regardless of ranking, has been among the worst in college football since a few years prior to P's departure. So unless your contention is that somehow P forgot how to recruit and then we hired four subsequent terribly incompetent staffs of recruiters, then I would suggest that there are a set of circumstances in place that, quite simply, make it difficult to recruit to syracuse. Facilities, game-day atmosphere, location, budget (recruiting and coaching staff salaries), etc. I don't care which ones folks want to point to, the only way it's not that is if you're feeling is that we simply haven't hired a single staff of solid recruiters in the past 25 years.
3) 4- and 5-star players. Forget for the moment that our most recent examples of 4- and 5-star players largely haven't performed to that level, what time are you pointing to when we landed handfuls of 4-star players? It hasn't happened in my lifetime as a fan unless perhaps you argue that it was the case during the Mac era (that was before stars came about but maybe we held more sway? Followed those teams but can't claim to know exactly how those recruits were viewed at that time). Even when we were regularly pumping out really good NFL players in the 90s, we weren't signing a boatload of 4-star, top 250 type kids. We were mining NJ and Florida, turning over rocks for players that were undervalued (Nebraska was the only other QB offer of significance for McNabb, Morlon Greenwood was late to football, Kevin Johnson was signed as a QB ...). The simple truth is that, while we were signing more highly sought after kids at that point, we weren't signing a boatload of 4-star kids every year.
4) When we were pulling in that talent during the majority of the P era, Rutgers was a joke, Temple was a joke, BC was dealing with the aftermath of their scandal, Pitt was mostly brutal in the Hackett/Majors Pt. 2 eras, UConn and Buffalo essentially didn't exist, Wisconsin was one of the only programs from outside the region that I remember that heavily recruited NJ on a regular basis, etc. PedSt did their thing but we basically were the only credible program in the northeast. That didn't hurt.
I don't know, I've tired of this by this point. But just so we're clear -- you offered no facts, and your general stance that 'recruiting needs to improve' is shared by most here. The 'excuses' for crappy recruiting are in fact real obstacles, by and large (are we still not aligned on the fact that the weather in upstate NY -- by any objective metric -- blows? Really?). The landscape of college football is tilted heavily in favor of the factories -- there are traditional powers that, for the most part, can't compete with the elite SEC teams -- Notre Dame, USC, Texas, Michigan, Nebraska, PedSt.
We all hope recruiting can improve and we can at least be a generally competitive program in most years, but expecting us to start pulling in a bunch of 4-stars, at the very least without establishing a credible, winning program, is patently absurd.
