[TrumpCard]

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.

[TrumpCard]

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.