[washingtonismoney]

I'll take your word on that. I've always heard that we're trying to identify talent years ahead of time (though I guess so is everyone else). Would be interesting for someone to ask Shaw about it, but he seems to get prickly when someone asks him something that implies he's making mistakes.

Basically, it's a matter of strategy. Shaw wants his offers to be real offers -- i.e. for every offer to be an actual commodity that, once tendered, can always be accepted. Basically every other coach in America doesn't operate this way, making hundreds of offers, which, definitionally, cannot all be accepted.

The strategy isn't misguided for a pretty simple reason. Making a brobdingnagian volume of offers presents problems when you've got a traffic jam for a position or for the overall class. So coaches chuck out the lowest-ranked players. Leaving aside the morality of this move, it's just not tenable for Stanford to engage in that kind of ... class management. (A player doing the senior-year work to get in needs the assurance that that work is meaningful.)

Still, even given that constraint, the staff is taking it to an unnecessary extreme.

[washingtonismoney]

I'll take your word on that. I've always heard that we're trying to identify talent years ahead of time (though I guess so is everyone else). Would be interesting for someone to ask Shaw about it, but he seems to get prickly when someone asks him something that implies he's making mistakes.

Basically, it's a matter of strategy. Shaw wants his offers to be real offers -- i.e. for every offer to be an actual commodity that, once tendered, can always be accepted. Basically every other coach in America doesn't operate this way, making hundreds of offers, which, definitionally, cannot all be accepted.

The strategy isn't misguided for a pretty simple reason. Making a brobdingnagian volume of offers presents problems when you've got a traffic jam for a position or for the overall class. So coaches chuck out the lowest-ranked players. Leaving aside the morality of this move, it's just not tenable for Stanford to engage in that kind of ... class management. (A player doing the senior-year work to get in needs the assurance that that work is meaningful.)

Still, even given that constraint, the staff is taking it to an unnecessary extreme.