[BostonCard]

The question is, "Did the staff reasonably maximize its chances at a good class or was it victimized by luck and circumstance?"

Here the answer is "they did not maximize their chances, not even close." They offered several players too late. For example, waiting on offering Nicolas Petit-Frere and Tyreke Smith was high-grade lunacy. These were high-level prospects who had received tons and tons of interest. You either recruit them seriously, by offering in the spring, or don't bother at all. Waiting until September was wasting everyone's time.

Targeting a one-OL class, as they did throughout most of the year, was an error for literally anyone who can do math and can think through the basics of offensive line play. While there are some exceptions, old experienced OL perform way better than young ones. Just look at how much better AT Hall performed in 2017 versus 2016. Or look at the way Khalil Wilkes went from being bossed in the 2012 Pac-12 Championship Game to performing as an above-average starter the next year.

If experience matters, you need to keep a constant fill of offensive linemen in the pipeline -- about 3.5 per year -- to give yourself a fighting chance of having a sufficient number of experienced offensive linemen to form the foundation of a good unit. The coaches only targeted one OL through most of the year, belatedly offering Trey Stratford (who's coming, thank god) and Nicolas Petit-Frere (who turned out to be the #11 player in the nation, and didn't come). Salyer was never that interested and Murray an admissions casualty. If they had anticipated this issue earlier, they would've offered slightly-lower rated offensive linemen and filled the class.

In general, the class was marked by an error to anticipate that not all offered players would come, and that more players would depart than anticipated. Both of these are predictable dynamics; the coaches simply failed to see the obvious. Because of that, there are dire voids in the ILB and OL pipeline. There were obvious targets who could've been offered, but weren't.

Now, I suppose the obvious thing is to say "there weren't academically qualified guys" and other forms of difficult-to-refute counterfactuals. I'll just say that these issues were predicted through basically all of 2017 by close observers, who proposed several alternatives that were ignored. While there are many good players in the 2018 class, there should be many more, and the team will suffer in 2020 as a result of the blunders in this class.

That's tough, but my sense is it is a generally fair assessment.  It certainly does look from the outside that the staff fell asleep at the wheel on this class, due to a combination of misjudging the impact of the early signing period, a lack of a meaningful back-up plan, or lack of aggressiveness in recruiting, confounded by a probably larger than expected share of players declaring for the pros early.  Yes, you don't want to make offers to players who will never contribute (in that case, you are making a four-year self-imposed NCAA sanction, since we don't generally run players off the team), but there is a lot of space between the plan A guys and guys who are going to just languish on the bench.  I think we could well have found a couple OL and ILB players who could have helped us, and prevented the sort of wafer thin weakness we've seen at DL the last few years.

The bevy of offers that have gone out the last few days is a step in the right direction, but we need to convert these into signings.

BC

One nit though:

"I'll just say that these issues were predicted through basically all of 2017 by close observers, who proposed several alternatives that were ignored."

Let's just say that fans screaming into a message board or even passing a message via contacts in the AE is not really "proposing an alternative", and not doing what said posts/messages recommended (even if they were legitimate) is not exactly "ignoring".  The staff, so far as I know, does not crowdsource its recruiting strategy out to its fans.

[BostonCard]

The question is, "Did the staff reasonably maximize its chances at a good class or was it victimized by luck and circumstance?"

Here the answer is "they did not maximize their chances, not even close." They offered several players too late. For example, waiting on offering Nicolas Petit-Frere and Tyreke Smith was high-grade lunacy. These were high-level prospects who had received tons and tons of interest. You either recruit them seriously, by offering in the spring, or don't bother at all. Waiting until September was wasting everyone's time.

Targeting a one-OL class, as they did throughout most of the year, was an error for literally anyone who can do math and can think through the basics of offensive line play. While there are some exceptions, old experienced OL perform way better than young ones. Just look at how much better AT Hall performed in 2017 versus 2016. Or look at the way Khalil Wilkes went from being bossed in the 2012 Pac-12 Championship Game to performing as an above-average starter the next year.

If experience matters, you need to keep a constant fill of offensive linemen in the pipeline -- about 3.5 per year -- to give yourself a fighting chance of having a sufficient number of experienced offensive linemen to form the foundation of a good unit. The coaches only targeted one OL through most of the year, belatedly offering Trey Stratford (who's coming, thank god) and Nicolas Petit-Frere (who turned out to be the #11 player in the nation, and didn't come). Salyer was never that interested and Murray an admissions casualty. If they had anticipated this issue earlier, they would've offered slightly-lower rated offensive linemen and filled the class.

In general, the class was marked by an error to anticipate that not all offered players would come, and that more players would depart than anticipated. Both of these are predictable dynamics; the coaches simply failed to see the obvious. Because of that, there are dire voids in the ILB and OL pipeline. There were obvious targets who could've been offered, but weren't.

Now, I suppose the obvious thing is to say "there weren't academically qualified guys" and other forms of difficult-to-refute counterfactuals. I'll just say that these issues were predicted through basically all of 2017 by close observers, who proposed several alternatives that were ignored. While there are many good players in the 2018 class, there should be many more, and the team will suffer in 2020 as a result of the blunders in this class.

That's tough, but my sense is it is a generally fair assessment.  It certainly does look from the outside that the staff fell asleep at the wheel on this class, due to a combination of misjudging the impact of the early signing period, a lack of a meaningful back-up plan, or lack of aggressiveness in recruiting, confounded by a probably larger than expected share of players declaring for the pros early.  Yes, you don't want to make offers to players who will never contribute (in that case, you are making a four-year self-imposed NCAA sanction, since we don't generally run players off the team), but there is a lot of space between the plan A guys and guys who are going to just languish on the bench.  I think we could well have found a couple OL and ILB players who could have helped us, and prevented the sort of wafer thin weakness we've seen at DL the last few years.

The bevy of offers that have gone out the last few days is a step in the right direction, but we need to convert these into signings.

BC

One nit though:

"I'll just say that these issues were predicted through basically all of 2017 by close observers, who proposed several alternatives that were ignored."

Let's just say that fans screaming into a message board or even passing a message via contacts in the AE is not really "proposing an alternative", and not doing what said posts/messages recommended (even if they were legitimate) is not exactly "ignoring".  The staff, so far as I know, does not crowdsource its recruiting strategy out to its fans.