but i didn’t want to address it as part of my first comment over there. incomplete information? howabout the concensus #1 recruiting class, and we had/have the best coach in the country and they as LSU fans should have known that.

Don’t get spoiled. I’ve followed recruiting pretty heavily for a long time, and usually the “consensus #1 recruiting class” means jack and squat for the FOLLOWING SEASON. Very few players are ready to come in and be immediate impact players on good teams. Usually, you get a lot of players who can come in and play limited roles and develop into key players. Just to take a few familiar examples, LSU receiver Early Doucet was the consensus #1 receiver, a 5-star, coming out of high school. How many passes did he catch his true freshman year? 18. Productive, but not exactly setting the world on fire. And that was for “the best coach in the country.” He ended up with a very nice career, and it would have been better if not for some injuries. And heck, like a lot of 5-stars, he was probably a little bit overrated from the beginning. His 5-star running mate from the 2004 class, Xavier Carter? Out of football after 2 unproductive years. Our most celebrated alum in the last several years, Glenn Dorsey, was a little-used reserve his true freshman year, playing a role and getting some time, but not headlining anything.

You can’t trust recruiting rankings. They’re as much about hype and media biases as anything. And even good recruiting classes usually don’t have a significant immediate impact. Like a lot of reasonable observers, I looked at Bama’s 2008 recruiting class and I said, “There are some good players here, but it’s probably not as good as advertised, and the true impact won’t be felt for at least a year.” It turns out that, unlike most heavily hyped recruiting classes, Bama actually got good production out of theirs immediately. I maintain that it could not have been reliably predicted by an outside observer.

I’ll probably always be a little miffed by one of those LSU guys calling me a moron when I was talking about how our level of talent is going up and LSU’s is either staying the same (at best) or dropping off a little. It was pretty clear we’d have a good team in 2008, since we had a lot of starters back from a top 35 defense and if you watched our games and the clips from practices, you can see little bits of improvement. I remember before 1999 telling people about how Cornelius Griffin would have a great season and people saying, “He only had ____ tackles last year. He’s okay.” I’m thinking, do you even know what a good defensive lineman looks like without the stats? At that time, if you gathered 100 players, five of which were NFL players, and let me watch them practice, I could pick the five NFL players off this kind of stuff.

I don’t know how to explain it without sitting down next to someone and pointing it out, like saying, “See how he shivers? That’s hard to do that well, and he does it better than others in drills.” There are no stats for some of that stuff and when you talk about it, people will call you a homer and a moron.

I mean, I look at the little crap because I used to play and I’ve coached for a lot of years. I know how things are supposed to look, and I know who’s doing a really good job even when the announcers, writers, and coaches don’t publicly acknowledge it because that’s how I see football.

Bama -4

but the past couple of years Ole Piss has been screwing with my bowels man.

2005 – last second field goal

2006 – Overtime win

2007 – He was out dammit! quit your bitchin!

2008 – Thank god for errant passes

I mean seriously this game has been affecting me physically for the past four seasons!