I disagree. It’s obviously easier to evaluate local kids. You have more data and more access, generally over a longer period of time. You often know family and many coaches.
Just because it’s harder to evaluate far away kids doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. It does mean you need to have a framework to assess which ones merit the consideration, what your key questions are, and how you will assess them, because evals take resources and non-local kids take resources.
I brought it up because it’s an unusual time in cfb history given covid restructions on recruiting. So a natural question for us on new commitments who haven't ever been to our campus is ’what do we know’ and how do we know it. This kid is a new commitment and non-local, hence the question.
TBH, I’ll be interested to see how we approach recruiting and evals all year, because it is so obvious we have not done ot well in the past.
Even with more data & more access you still have kids who came here & busted despite being local, so what does that mean about the eval? Kai Leon-Herbert & Navaughn Donaldson are both from South Fla, both were 4-star kids coming out of HS & both have been busts despite having supposedly more access & more data, so what happened? How did we miss evaluate the two of them even though they're from our backyard? N'Kosi Perry is a FL boy from Ocala that was a 4-star & top 20 QB in his class, who outside of 2 or 3 games has been terrible most of his career, so what happened with that eval?
Location doesn't dictate ability to evaluate, evals are all 100% predicated on whichever coach is doing the eval. There's a reason why Bama, Clemson, Oh St, LSU, UGA & every other program all recruit heavily nationally, it's because they want the best players in the country & if they're not all in their backyards they go get'em.
If local evals were so accurate, we wouldn't be in this predicament now. We wouldn't have missed so severely on every single good player that has left the region & state to go elsewhere while being sattled with a much less talented player we took in their place. Evals have nothing to do with location & everything to do with Eyes.
And normal recruiting has been suspended for basically 3 months now, so any team taking commits more than likely has never had the player visit in person unless they did earlier in the year or last year, that's not stopping teams from accepting verbals. So what should we do, not accept any commits until the quarantine shutdown is over?
And there's no way to know how any eval will turn out until the kid is on your team, in your program, practicing & playing in games, so in that case, what's the point in paying attention to any recruit until they take their first snap in a game?
Ultimately, I get the point you're trying to make but unless you're fortune teller there's no way to know, so you either don't take the kid just because he's not from FL or you trust that Lashlee & Field might know what they're doing & accept the fact that it's possible for them to recruit & land a good player who just so happens to live in TX.
Otherwise, what the **** else are they supposed to do at this time? Lol.
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