[msqueri]

81alum, honest question: do you follow Stanford football recruiting closely and subscribe to the sites that report on it? Your read strikes me as uninformed to be honest, unless you're calling liars the dozen to a couple dozen recruits who have privately reported to insiders and/or reporters that they were formally accepted during the Shaw era. This is more than just sophistry. Petros repeated an old talking point and if Shaw relayed that this week (possible it's an old module in Petros' brain he unthinkingly repeated on this broadcast) then that was a lie. The fact is we now lose 3-7 admitted recruits annually these days. It's a shocking and disorienting development but it's happening. These applications aren't being "pulled." We shepherd recruits through the process, they fill out the whole application, Stanford Admissions accepts them, and then the recruits pocket the prestige/sense of pride and go elsewhere. That's what's happening.

I don't think it's the end of the world this is happening by the way. I have said for years that we need to a) see some admissions rejections of coveted football players and b) see some admitted players spurn us to know that we are pushing the envelope on admissible players and on non-self selector football first players. I give Shaw credit for getting Jacobe Johnson and Jordan Mathews as far in the recruiting process as he did. That's a good thing. Better to have a long shot than no shot. But if we're going to repeat the old trope that nobody turns Stanford football down, that's a lie.

As for our recruiting pitch, I think the standard (standard an important word as there are some recruits I'd like us to pitch like a factory and, of course, the self-selector Stanford Men for whom Shaw is perfect) recruiting playbook for Stanford should be that you don't have to choose between football and academics, and it should have a negative recruiting component that Stanford is the only school for which that's true (unless we're too embarrassed to say that with a straight face for recruits considering Notre Dame). I do not think it is a winning strategy for us to make academics and the Stanford degree our main pitch. For one, that's not something we actually need to sell that aggressively. Moreover, we won't get enough good football players that way. Those who prioritize academics have been coming to Stanford for decades. That's merely a baseline. You need players who have legitimate NFL aspirations as those are the players who will matter on Saturdays.

[msqueri]

81alum, honest question: do you follow Stanford football recruiting closely and subscribe to the sites that report on it? Your read strikes me as uninformed to be honest, unless you're calling liars the dozen to a couple dozen recruits who have privately reported to insiders and/or reporters that they were formally accepted during the Shaw era. This is more than just sophistry. Petros repeated an old talking point and if Shaw relayed that this week (possible it's an old module in Petros' brain he unthinkingly repeated on this broadcast) then that was a lie. The fact is we now lose 3-7 admitted recruits annually these days. It's a shocking and disorienting development but it's happening. These applications aren't being "pulled." We shepherd recruits through the process, they fill out the whole application, Stanford Admissions accepts them, and then the recruits pocket the prestige/sense of pride and go elsewhere. That's what's happening.

I don't think it's the end of the world this is happening by the way. I have said for years that we need to a) see some admissions rejections of coveted football players and b) see some admitted players spurn us to know that we are pushing the envelope on admissible players and on non-self selector football first players. I give Shaw credit for getting Jacobe Johnson and Jordan Mathews as far in the recruiting process as he did. That's a good thing. Better to have a long shot than no shot. But if we're going to repeat the old trope that nobody turns Stanford football down, that's a lie.

As for our recruiting pitch, I think the standard (standard an important word as there are some recruits I'd like us to pitch like a factory and, of course, the self-selector Stanford Men for whom Shaw is perfect) recruiting playbook for Stanford should be that you don't have to choose between football and academics, and it should have a negative recruiting component that Stanford is the only school for which that's true (unless we're too embarrassed to say that with a straight face for recruits considering Notre Dame). I do not think it is a winning strategy for us to make academics and the Stanford degree our main pitch. For one, that's not something we actually need to sell that aggressively. Moreover, we won't get enough good football players that way. Those who prioritize academics have been coming to Stanford for decades. That's merely a baseline. You need players who have legitimate NFL aspirations as those are the players who will matter on Saturdays.