Of course we have to build.
WHAT HAVE WE BEEN DOING FOR THE PAST 3 YEARS?
Does that not count as building? It's 3 years of Mario and his staff NOT BUILDING.
Building has to have a start and stop date.
Nearly every other Div 1 school has better LBs than Miami, and Miami has one of the best NIL programs in the nation and Mario, who is supposed to be a top recruiter.
Mario should have had a top level defense by now, and he has a worse product than when he got here.
The problem is that most people see 3 years and are expecting us to look like UGA talent wise. It doesn't work like that, even with the portal. We have had really 2 back to back great classes after years and years of poor evals and mediocre recruiting. UGA has been stacking top 3 classes for the last decade. Same with Bama, OSU, and Texas. Giving us two years of classes is a nice start, but we need 4-5 years of elite recruiting before we are building depth the likes of those teams have.
As I said, we've had 2 good classes back to back but that means those kids are Freshman and Sophomores. There are lot's of examples of younger players that come in and can make an impact, but that has skewed people's minds into thinking every kid that isn't a star day 1 is a jag or failure. The fact is that MOST kids take time to get their footing in college. Whether its weight gain, adjusting to college lifestyle, learning the playbooks, adjusting to the college game speed, or anything else, some kids just need time. We've got some rooms that look better than others and that's on Mario moving forward to get it fixed. The regression on defense is something that needs to be studied and I'm not sure how you can put it on Mario, but that's another conversation.
The most important thing is are we seeing improvement year over year and are we continuing to stack talent, because despite what you say the "Building" is never done with a football team. The answer to both of those questions is a resounding yes. We're 9-1 with the most exciting offense in college football, a heisman contender at QB and still have all of our goals ahead of us. We're projected to finish top 10 in recruiting again and we have our own players throughout the roster contributing. Guys like Cici, Rivers, Rodriguez (before injury) Arroyo, X, Fletch, Horton, George, Borregales, Bain, Wes, and OJ are all getting burn and contributing as guys we developed. We're in a good spot and this has been the most fun season as a Canes fan since 2017.