quote:
Arky will never have a top 10 defense and so that is why the two defensive options are lower in my list. The hardest players to recruit in football are elite d-linemen as they are easy to spot in elementary school. D Line talent is what separates a top ten recruiting class from a top 25 classes, and Arky can never be a top 10 recruiting program.

Lots of fail and lots of truth in that post. If a kid is easy to spot as a blue chip in elementary then it should pretty damn easy to find them in HS. It is a misnomer that Arkansas doesnt produce Dline talent. When looking at the current roster of Arkansans in the NFL 1/2 of them are D-linemen, however, none went to the U. of Arkansas. They either went out of state or to small in state schools and worked their way into the NFL.

Nutt and the MSM were really bad at talent evaluation, the only players off his Arkansas teams that played the same position in the league as they did in college were MacFadden, Felix, Houston, Hamlin, and Nate Garner. Matt Jones QB to WR, Shawn Andrews T to G, Jason Peters TE to elite T, George Wilson WR to S, hell they wanted Ryan Mallett to be a TE. Arkansas produces big burly Dlinemen, the Fayetteville school just misses bigtime on recruiting them. Arkansas coaches and fans have gotten into this mindset that very few kids from Arkansas have SEC talent, where the majority of Arkansas kids in the NFL today went to schools other than the Razorbacks.

Some of the best players in Arkansas' history have been DE and DT, and they've been homegrown. There are many challenges to recruiting at Arkansas, the depth of talented HS kids makes it critical that the kids you do take from the state aren't Darius Winston type busts that eat scholarship space.

If Arkansas could have kept the Petrino thing going and been a one or two loss team at this point in the season then those Jordan Diamond, Davonte Neal, DGB, the juco WR that flipped to OU, Anthony Barnett, and the 15 other high profile guys we just missed out on last year would be commmiting and playing in Fville. Success and winning are the most important factors in recruiting. Win big, swag big, look big, feel big, recruit big, win big, repeat.