People on the internet love stars, period. They will try to wrap it up and cover it with window dressing and other nonsense to deny it, but most of the time it comes back to people here trust guys who are unqualified and unemployable in any sort of football role on any level, and aren't employable by any real journalistic entity.
The NFL gets to watch 4 years of ABC, CBS, ESPN and coaches tape of fully developed players, they get to work them out, poke them, prod them, ask them idiotic questions, explore their minds... and they hit about 50% in the draft. Yet we trust failed mailmen who watch 3 minutes of JR year tape? I still find this astounding.
Save your outrage, I am not pointing fingers, and its just my opinion from 15 years or so of reading this stuff. The internet football rankings and rating should be treated as a novelty, a diversion, something fun, no more.
The highest ranked class in UM history was literally our worst (consensus #1under Erickson). And I am not exaggerating. I am not saying it didn't live up to expectations.. I am literally saying it was the very worst class in UM history. What a dichotomy, eh?
You gotta let your coach do his thing. If we were landing 20 kids in January I'd worry more. But the fact that we took a lot of these kids early in the cycle should tell you we got kids we wanted. I'd also point out that after LOI day last year (and also by some indirect references this year) Golden has specifically pointed out some kids he was excited about that were very lowly rated by the services. But we have no reason to doubt yet. Golden pulled in a really solid class in 7 weeks in the middle of a ****show last year. The class he "inherited" had three kids committed. I've NEVER seen anything like that. Usually you have 16-18 kids committed and you get to hold onto 12 of them or so. He basically started from scratch in December. Nuts. So to me, the early returns on his ability to recruit, his work ethic his process, his communication, his relationship building, his positivity, and his results to date, point to success.
Have fun with it, but all the empirical evidence, IMHO, shows me that this guy can recruit, and develop. I'm excited to watch it unfold. If it goes bad, I will be disappointed. But me and the mailmen don't know better. My 2 cents.