2019 ESD Analysis

Just random thoughts about the 2019 signing class. It's a bit long so no worries if you don't want to read the whole thing.

It hurts to have several top athletes flip on you on the last minute which means either they were lying, they were "sold" on another school for a reason we couldn't compete with like early PT, or got cold feet at the last minute.

CEO decided to go national this year. It burned us with those top few athletes, but we're also forgetting we signed kids from CA, VA, CO and WA which isn't our usual footprint. We may have made mistakes with a couple in-state athletes, but in retrospect, the coaches honestly thought they were getting other kids and the issue is this: we either slow play kids and potentially lose out like Etienne, or let them commit early and risk having to make a tough decision if you think you need to make room. You could argue we should have never let Lee go to begin with, but you can't argue that CEO and crew don't know how to make good decisions pertaining to personnel. Those guys know what they need/want in order for us to win.

This is still a top 5 class that addressed a lot of needs and honestly, WR really wasn't a need and we still ended up with 4 passing targets anyway.

It's fun to ride the hype of recruiting rankings, but in these times of the transfer portal and graduate transfers becoming popular, we can still have a chance to sign someone who can help out the team at a later date. Graduate transfer window for us opens back up during the summer so we can always try to pick up a one year wonder before next season.

Lastly, insiders are fun to listen to, but at the end of the day you can't trust anything but dry ink. Even friends of recruits may not know their true intentions so take everything with a grain of salt. Let's not scare away people who have good inside info when they are wrong, but we should also not get too excited when they give us info that we want to hear either.

Sorry for the ramble, but Geaux Tigers!