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RE: Class of 2023 - Spiny_Norman - 12-16-2021

Still only one QB offer from what I can see

RE: Class of 2023 - SamuelMcF - 12-16-2021

(12-16-2021, 02:00 PM)Spiny_Norman Wrote:  Still only one QB offer from what I can see

Lonergan has visited and we have traction. This is not 2022.

RE: Class of 2023 - TrumpCard - 12-16-2021

Recruiting is not my primary gripe at the moment. Shaw has essentially wrapped up another top 20 class, pending Wright signing. The 2023 class got started with a 4-star TE committing the day after early signing day. I can be patient on additional 2023 QB offers while we wait and see on Lonergan.

RE: Class of 2023 - washingtonismoney - 12-16-2021

(12-16-2021, 02:09 PM)TrumpCard Wrote:  Recruiting is not my primary gripe at the moment. Shaw has essentially wrapped up another top 20 class, pending Wright signing. The 2023 class got started with a 4-star TE committing the day after early signing day. I can be patient on additional 2023 QB offers while we wait and see on Lonergan.

Agree with this take...for Shaw, the recruitment will sort itself out (a good level with some nitpicks) if the W-L does. And that's a mystery for me.

RE: Class of 2023 - Papa John - 12-16-2021

I think recruiting has been a big factor in 3-9, 4-2, and 4-8. Others (Samuel McF, Boston Card?) can do a better job than I of explaining in detail re: how recruiting--rankings aside--has been woefully inadequate for the past 4 or 5 cycles.

Maybe I'm alone in this, but recruiting, while not my only concern, is still my number one concern with this team. Having said that, it looks like 2023 is off to a great start. Maybe Jaxon Howard will deliver an early Christmas surprise.

RE: Class of 2023 - TrumpCard - 12-16-2021

(12-16-2021, 02:30 PM)Papa John Wrote:  I think recruiting has been a big factor in 3-9, 4-2, and 4-8. Others (Samuel McF, Boston Card?) can do a better job than I of explaining in detail re: how recruiting--rankings aside--has been woefully inadequate for the past 4 or 5 cycles.

I said recruiting is not my primary gripe at the moment.  Despite some significant exceptions, Shaw has been mostly very good in recruiting over the course of his tenure, which tells me that he is capable of recruiting at a high level.  And, at the moment, the tea leaves look okay to me.  The 2022 class was fine, the 2023 class is starting out fine, and like Samuel said, if Shaw is able to right the ship on the field, I have some confidence that recruiting will continue to be fine.  I actually get the sense that Stanford has fixed some of the problems that ailed the recruiting machine as recently as a couple of years ago.  For example, Stanford now has spring official visits and early enrollment, even if more limited in numbers than most other schools.  And Shaw no longer limits the offers he makes to the number of known scholarship openings, so he actually has a shot at filling his allotted scholarships.  The 2021 recruiting class was bad (obviously), but I think that happened mostly due to COVID, not due to anything Shaw reasonably could have solved.  So, like I said, I have bigger fish to fry than complaining about recruiting at the moment.

RE: Class of 2023 - SamuelMcF - 12-16-2021

(12-16-2021, 02:30 PM)Papa John Wrote:  I think recruiting has been a big factor in 3-9, 4-2, and 4-8. Others (Samuel McF, Boston Card?) can do a better job than I of explaining in detail re: how recruiting--rankings aside--has been woefully inadequate for the past 4 or 5 cycles.

Maybe I'm alone in this, but recruiting, while not my only concern, is still my number one concern with this team. Having said that, it looks like 2023 is off to a great start. Maybe Jaxon Howard will deliver an early Christmas surprise.

Recruiting has been woefully REACTIVE and LACKING DEPTH AT KEY POSITIONS for the past 4 or 5 cycles. I would not say "inadequate" considering the on-paper talent we've been signing.

When on-paper talent dictates this team should be at least pushing for a top-25 ranking but it's one of the worst in the country on both sides of the ball, you blame recruiting (the actual act of landing recruits) and not development or roster management?

RE: Class of 2023 - TrumpCard - 12-16-2021

(12-16-2021, 03:52 PM)SamuelMcF Wrote:  
(12-16-2021, 02:30 PM)Papa John Wrote:  I think recruiting has been a big factor in 3-9, 4-2, and 4-8. Others (Samuel McF, Boston Card?) can do a better job than I of explaining in detail re: how recruiting--rankings aside--has been woefully inadequate for the past 4 or 5 cycles.

Maybe I'm alone in this, but recruiting, while not my only concern, is still my number one concern with this team. Having said that, it looks like 2023 is off to a great start. Maybe Jaxon Howard will deliver an early Christmas surprise.

Recruiting has been woefully REACTIVE and LACKING DEPTH AT KEY POSITIONS for the past 4 or 5 cycles. I would not say "inadequate" considering the on-paper talent we've been signing.

When on-paper talent dictates this team should be at least pushing for a top-25 ranking but it's one of the worst in the country on both sides of the ball, you blame recruiting (the actual act of landing recruits) and not development or roster management?

It depends how you want to frame it.  Was Stanford "reactive" to add finally spring official visits and early enrollment last year, and to finally start making more offers than known scholarship slots?  Obviously, yes.  (In fact, some of that might have been even more delayed if not for COVID.  Hopefully, those changes remain in place indefinitely, now that they've proven to be helpful.)  But is it also correct to say that the prospects for recruiting going forward appear good, if Shaw can right the product on the field?  I think the answer there is yes too, in part because Shaw and Stanford ultimately did fix those problems.  Now, if you all see additional problems brewing where Stanford and Shaw are not being sufficiently proactive, then it's a different story.  But I'm not sure I see that, and I don't know that I've seen enough to say that "reactive" is a character trait of Shaw or Stanford.  

As far as depth goes, you're obviously right that Shaw should not take "gap years" at QB.  Maybe he's learned that lesson now?  We do know that he's taken a QB each of the last two years and that he's planning to take one in 2023 as well, so that's why I'm not griping about QB recruiting at the moment.  

The roster this year had a number of other weaknesses, but I would not say that most resulted from recruiting insufficient numbers at specific positions.  Didn't the team use all 85 scholarships for the first time in a while, or at least close to it?  That suggests more overall depth than usual (though not all of it high quality depth, and obviously not even across the roster).  To me, when a team uses all its scholarships and the team still has major problems at position groups across the field, that doesn't reflect a problem with recruiting insufficient depth.  Now, it's true that the DL was thinner than most position groups for sure, but I don't think that situation is as much an indictment of recruiting depth as you do.  The fact that Andres Fox, Lance Keneley, and Josh Pakola did not contribute on the DL in 2021 is due primarily to factors other than decisions by Shaw regarding the number of DL offers to make.  Those were all credible DL recruits, even if the first two were a little on the skinny side in high school.

RE: Class of 2023 - SamuelMcF - 12-16-2021

[tweet]https://twitter.com/_JacksonArnold_/status/1471629475771207684[/tweet]

Nevermind!

RE: Class of 2023 - BostonCard - 12-16-2021

(12-16-2021, 02:07 PM)SamuelMcF Wrote:  
(12-16-2021, 02:00 PM)Spiny_Norman Wrote:  Still only one QB offer from what I can see

Lonergan has visited and we have traction. This is not 2022.

I thought we were losing traction with Lonegran, hence the agita about only one QB offer…

BC

RE: Class of 2023 - Papa John - 12-17-2021

(12-16-2021, 03:52 PM)SamuelMcF Wrote:  
(12-16-2021, 02:30 PM)Papa John Wrote:  I think recruiting has been a big factor in 3-9, 4-2, and 4-8. Others (Samuel McF, Boston Card?) can do a better job than I of explaining in detail re: how recruiting--rankings aside--has been woefully inadequate for the past 4 or 5 cycles.

Maybe I'm alone in this, but recruiting, while not my only concern, is still my number one concern with this team. Having said that, it looks like 2023 is off to a great start. Maybe Jaxon Howard will deliver an early Christmas surprise.

Recruiting has been woefully REACTIVE and LACKING DEPTH AT KEY POSITIONS for the past 4 or 5 cycles. I would not say "inadequate" considering the on-paper talent we've been signing.

When on-paper talent dictates this team should be at least pushing for a top-25 ranking but it's one of the worst in the country on both sides of the ball, you blame recruiting (the actual act of landing recruits) and not development or roster management?

By woefully inadequate, I was thinking of holes left by underrecruiting at key positions and the fact that Stanford wasn't filling its 85-scholarship limit--self-imposed scholarship limits, as someone else put it. 

So if you look at recruiting rankings alone, then yeah, we should be in top four in the Pac-12 every year. But, unlike other teams, we can't dip into the transfer portal to fill holes when unfortunate things happen like career-ending injuries or starters turn pro or grad transfer.

To answer your question, I do blame development and roster management, but I would argue that inadequate recruiting--the actual act of landing high-quality recruits in a way that doesn't leave holes in positions of needs--is the biggest reason why 2019 and 2021 yielded such awful results.

But it does look like I'm the only one who feels this way...

RE: Class of 2023 - BostonCard - 12-17-2021

It sounds like you guys are using “ inadequate recruiting” and “poor roster management” to refer to the same thing, namely leaving massive gaps in recruiting at key positions for multiple years.

BC

RE: Class of 2023 - TrumpCard - 12-17-2021

Where is the massive roster gap?

After taking a transfer, the team had 4 QBs on the roster this year. That is plenty in number. The problem was the lack of an even barely credible backup. 

Maybe DL. Keep in mind that Fox and Keneley were recruited as DLs. Reynolds did, in fact, take 2 DL recruits in ‘17, ‘18, and ‘20. He only took 1 in ‘19, which was very unfortunate, but he took 3 in ‘21 and 3 more in ‘22. IMHO, taking 7 DLs, mostly spread evenly, over a 4 year period was bad, but not gross malpractice for a 3-4 “base” defense that mostly played nickel anyway.  The roster management issue is the failure to adjust when it became clear that the plans were not working out. Other teams would have added a transfer or two in that circumstance. Stanford couldn’t or wouldn’t.

RE: Class of 2023 - Papa John - 12-17-2021

There was an OL gap in 2019. Junior Walker Little was hurt in the opening game against Northwestern and was replaced by true freshman Walter Rouse. And as more of the starters got hurt, they were replaced by other true freshmen: Branson Bragg (only played one game), Barrett Miller, Jake Hornibrook. I think they set some kind of record--a not-so-desired record--for most true frosh OL starters in a season.

But a recruiting gap to me isn't just about quantity. It's also quality. If one player in a position group excels, but the other healthy players in the same group, who have access to the same coaching, conditioning, etc., never improve, that tells me that maybe the primary issue is recruiting.

RE: Class of 2023 - SamuelMcF - 12-17-2021

(12-17-2021, 10:16 AM)TrumpCard Wrote:  Where is the massive roster gap?

After taking a transfer, the team had 4 QBs on the roster this year. That is plenty in number. The problem was the lack of an even barely credible backup. 

Maybe DL. Keep in mind that Fox and Keneley were recruited as DLs. Reynolds did, in fact, take 2 DL recruits in ‘17, ‘18, and ‘20. He only took 1 in ‘19, which was very unfortunate, but he took 3 in ‘21 and 3 more in ‘22. IMHO, taking 7 DLs, mostly spread evenly, over a 4 year period was bad, but not gross malpractice for a 3-4 “base” defense that mostly played nickel anyway.  The roster management issue is the failure to adjust when it became clear that the plans were not working out. Other teams would have added a transfer or two in that circumstance. Stanford couldn’t or wouldn’t.

This year:
- Zero senior/5th year OL
- Just one scholarship senior/5th year safety (sorry, Noah Williams does not count despite being on scholarship)
- Just two TEs older than redshirt freshmen is not enough for an offense that consistently runs 3-TE sets and prides itself on TEs...there should be at least one in every class, period

Future:
- Just one ILB total in the '20-'21 2-year cohort (this will bite us in 2 years, especially since the two 2022 ILBs are low-rated...though I believe Matt Rose may surprise)
- If we say Reynolds recruited Keneley as a DL in '20, that means we can also say Anderson recruited just one OLB total in the '20-'21 2-year cohort
- Signing just Jayson Raines last class then 2 WRs this class will prove to not be enough (possibly remedied if PWO Thompson makes an impact or we land someone big along with more depth in '23)

2022 signed basically a full class across the board. This should be the case every single class, especially in the new reality of guys bolting for the portal as soon as they get their degree.

RE: Class of 2023 - Papa John - 12-17-2021

(12-17-2021, 01:36 PM)SamuelMcF Wrote:  2022 signed basically a full class across the board. This should be the case every single class, especially in the new reality of guys bolting for the portal as soon as they get their degree.

Amen, SamuelMcF!

RE: Class of 2023 - TrumpCard - 12-17-2021

(12-17-2021, 01:36 PM)SamuelMcF Wrote:  This year:
- Zero senior/5th year OL
- Just one scholarship senior/5th year safety (sorry, Noah Williams does not count despite being on scholarship)
- Just two TEs older than redshirt freshmen is not enough for an offense that consistently runs 3-TE sets and prides itself on TEs...there should be at least one in every class, period

Future:
- Just one ILB total in the '20-'21 2-year cohort (this will bite us in 2 years, especially since the two 2022 ILBs are low-rated...though I believe Matt Rose may surprise)
- If we say Reynolds recruited Keneley as a DL in '20, that means we can also say Anderson recruited just one OLB total in the '20-'21 2-year cohort
- Signing just Jayson Raines last class then 2 WRs this class will prove to not be enough (possibly remedied if PWO Thompson makes an impact or we land someone big along with more depth in '23)

2022 signed basically a full class across the board. This should be the case every single class, especially in the new reality of guys bolting for the portal as soon as they get their degree.

Let's start with a few inconvenient truths for the "recruiting is the problem" crowd.  First, the team filled, or close to filled, its scholarship allotment this year.  Second, the true freshman class, which was small and may be the weakest in terms of quality in the Shaw era, wasn't going to contribute much even if Shaw had knocked it out of the park.  Third, Stanford performed like a bottom 25 team in college football this year, even though it recruited like a top 25 team on average for the 2017-2020 period.  Fourth, although Stanford played truly horrific football when McKee was out due to injury, Stanford still was a bad college football team during many of the games when it had an elite QB on the field.  

With all that in mind, my position is that it is theoretically possible that Stanford recruited so horribly at one or maybe two positions that the recruiting caused the bad play, but it is physically impossible for Stanford to have recruited so badly across the board as to have caused the bad play.

Although the 2018 OL class should have had 1-2 more recruits (which would have been offset with a smaller 2019 group), the combination of events that caused this OL to be so pitiful was neither inevitable nor primarily due to recruiting failures.  

At safety, the team projected to have Williamson, McGill, Williams, Gilman and Porter.  A bare minimum two-deep of players who arrived at Stanford on scholarship is not ideal, but when the two-deep includes two returning starters and there appears to be a back up plan a former walk-on and/or with moving CBs over, it's not a recruiting disaster.  

If you call Keneley a DE and say that Stanford recruited only 1 OLB in 2020-2021, I'm still okay with it because of the quality and depth in surrounding years.  Herron, Aybar, Bailey, and Cooper are some of the top defensive recruits in the last half dozen years, and they all play OLB.

I can't see an argument that the current team faltered because of WR or ILB recruiting.  Those positions were in good shape coming into the year.  And the transition to a 4-3 defense means that ILB will be de-empahasized, so I don't see an issue, even going forward.  I would have been happier to see some higher end WR recruits, but I don't think 3 scholarship WRs in 2 years is a disaster, especially for a program that, as you note, emphasizes the TE position and recruited reasonably well there in recent years.

RE: Class of 2023 - BostonCard - 12-18-2021

Let’s start with the fact that to be as bad as we were, there likely had to be both recruiting and development problems, with an additional sprinkling of bad luck and some structural changes in college football to boot.  This isn’t an either/or situation.

However, Sam and others are right.  Recruiting rankings don’t tell the story; we were having discussions four years ago about the red lights that were flashing on the recruiting side.  We knew that we were leaving scholarships unfilled three and four years ago… those are players who would have been juniors and seniors and thus a the peek of their contribution, that are instead going to be underdeveloped freshmen and sophomores.  I’m more sanguine than most here about the prospects in 2023 and 2024 (if we have a qb), but recruiting mistakes made three and four years ago are having their peek impact now.

As Sam mentioned, we played with zero senior/5th year offensive linemen this year. Let’s look at why.  In 2017, we signed three offensive linemen (Little, Sarrell, and Dalman).  All of them are gone (to the NFL, so not for bad reasons), but three is in the low end of how many OL you’d want to have in a class.  So, you would have wanted to follow that up with a jumbo OL class of around five.  We signed one O-lineman, Trey Stratford, who didn’t work out.  So, we have a line that relied on sophomores and juniors, but because of the pandemic, they are more like freshmen and sophomores.  Is it any wonder that they struggled?

Now, let’s look at defensive linemen.  We have two D-linemen in the 2017 recruiting class (DWP and Ryan Johnson), which, again, is fine but on the smallish side (you want to average out to about 5 every two years).  The next year, just Booker, on a year where you would have wanted three.  The next, Pekola, who is not with the team, and maybe Herron.  But if you are going to recruit an undersized lineman that you hope fills out, then you have to account for the possibility that they don’t and have to play linebacker.  In other words, you do it if you have at least two solid DLs, but not as your second defensive lineman, a year after you only took one.  So, now we are looking at three experienced linemen leaving, nobody left in the class behind them, and then you repeat the error by taking one true lineman (Philips) and one undersized edge player (Keneley).  The defensive line situation even if you call Keneley  and Herron as defensive linemen was bad (five over three years, when you should have eight); with Herron and Keneley pushed to LB, it is a disaster.

There are 85 scholarship spots.  You can get 10 offensive and 10 defensive players a year and have five scholarships left over (a little more if there is some attrition) for fifth years and specialists.  So, every year should be like 2022, where you recruit a full class (which would have been close to the platonic ideal had Ramsey not left).  But making allowances for the fact that sometimes you wind up a bit short, you have to come back the next year and recruit more players at that position group.

One year under recruiting players at a position is bad but recoverable.  Doing so in two consecutive years is malpractice.  The problem is that the team doesn’t feel it immediately; the effects are felt three years down the line.  Which is why Sam has already identified the spots that are going to be problematic in 2023/24: ILB (though we might be ok if we switch to a 4-3, impending trouble at that position and at NT might have been a contributor to the switch), and WR.  We should get two solid MLB next year and three good wide receivers.

BC

RE: Class of 2023 - TrumpCard - 12-18-2021

This raises an interesting question: How many spots do we project in the ‘23 class?  Due to COVID redshirting rules, this coming year, Stanford could have 85 scholarship players, none of them running out of eligibility in 2022. I assume there won’t be any 6th year players and not too many 5th year players returning in 2023, but isn’t ‘23 going to be a relatively small class?

RE: Class of 2023 - Phogge - 12-18-2021

Only a couple of difference makers in the last few years. Just about nobody on defense to make plays. Whiffs on recruiting? Lack of development? Fact is Stanford doesn’t have the players it had in 2009-15. Period.