re: Revisiting Jay’s #1 Recruiting Class

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Now we seem to be really dependent on the portal for success.

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So is every other major college program. We had 13 players drafted last year. We are going to have a bunch this year. That tells me Jay is doing his job.

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Definitely not the No 1 class in hindsight. Bad evals or bad development?

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So was Jay Johnson the source of this #1 ranking or was it other media outlets ?

All these players could have went almost anywhere they wanted.

For any athletic PROGRAM you need 10% of your classes be solid contributors from day 1.

You're not going to get a Crews, Fournette, Reese, etc in every class, nor will you get a field of freshmen win a title.

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Neal has been hurt but when he's been healthy he's been a stud.

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He’s also young. Came to LSU after his junior year of HS, by reclassifying to senior.

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Show me the Coastal Carolina that has won a football national championship?

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This is the point he was making. Even if you are the big school with the top talent you can get beat in baseball. Basketball is close to it also. When it comes to football you have the same 15-20 teams that will truly compete for a national championship. The talent gap is just too large on the field.

What people never seem to understand or keep in mind is that these recruiting rankings are made based on performances in showcases and future projection. They do drills in showcases and can show off their tools. In game performance is taken into account too of course, but the prospect rankings are made based on the tools a kid has and the potential of them 5 years down the road. The rankings are made for these kids to get drafted. That is why you see Kling at the top. Kling probably has really good exit velos in BP, shows all the other tools, and his high school competition was in Pennsylvania, which is not the best, so he likely held his own in high school games. He is on year 2 going to year 3 of that prospect ranking of them thinking 5 years down the road. Obviously his potential has fallen off when it comes to these rankings because of the in game performance at the college level now. Back then that wasn't the case.

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No it isn’t. Show me the Coastal Carolina that has won a football national championship?

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I don’t really think that’s mutually exclusive with his point about needing a bit of luck. If anything, it supports it.

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There are almost the same number of college teams in the various sports, and each has a single national championship.

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Well that’s not really true. You have 300 D1 baseball programs. 351 D1 basketball programs. 134 FBS programs in football. There are far fewer teams competing for a championship in football than baseball/basketball.

And because of the different playoff formats, it’s much harder for lower-tier conference teams to get into a position where luck is even a factor in football.

I’m not going to go as far as to say it’s definitively “harder to win a championship” in baseball. But it is kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison.

To make a claim like this and then disappear without responding says a lot.

Noot and Shores getting hurt is obviously one of the big reasons the class doesnt feel as impactful as it should be. That's your top 2 high impact arms from that class.

If Noot and Shores never got hurt, you'd probably be singing quite a different tune, we know Shores can be elite just from what we saw as a freshman.

You're not ever really going to have a case where every single high ranked player produces high results especially when you have a number of them in 1 class.

I wouldnt give up Neal quite yet either, I could see him putting it all together before leaving here. Keep in mind the dude is the same age as the freshmen here this season and he's been dealing with an injury. Milam and Anderson are actually older than Neal is.