Posted by sull21858 on 4/14/2013 11:52:00 AM (view original):
If under 5 scholarships I don't spend a dime other then FSS for the first 24-36 hours of recruiting.
i TOTALLY disagree with this. with mid majors, sure, you cant battle for a guy and win, if a BCS school wants them. but still, getting your name on a guy is some deterrent. so why not get on cheap? i dont suggest getting in major battles early - thats crazy. but going for some recruits at the top of your range (by quality, not ranking) makes total sense. if you dont get them, what do you lose? a grand or two? big deal - if you get them, they can change a program.
the reality of mid major recruiting is, if you have say 4 openings and 60K, there are still a ton of players you cant get. setting aside 20-30K for a battle, versus 35-45, isnt going to make much difference. with mid majors, if you having a clear pecking order on your prospects - you are most likely either at the top of the range, where you arent going to get *any* of those guys, or, you simply havent looked and found enough guys. theres a casual gradient. so first, id challenge that its rare there is even a 40k battle worth fighting. second, id argue there are very few battles you even *could* win for 40k, that you'd lose for 25K. its just not the normal case. can it happen? yes, but playing for that case makes no sense to me.
the trick to mid major recruiting is scouting far and wide, and also, deep. if you have that 60K and spend less than 15K or so on FSS and evals, you are probably not recruiting very well. now of course there are many ways to win, but FSS'ing a lot of states, and further scouting many players, to me is the clear winning strategy. there just arent enough local recruits who will slip through the cracks (ESPECIALLY after a day or two). but far and wide, a bunch of guys will slip through. if you find the guard with high/high spd, per, bh, well that could really take a guy that isn't high on any big school's radar and make him a gem. big schools cant afford for a 50 ath, 60 spd, per, bh, pass type guy to improve, even if hes got highs in all 5 of those. and if those are low high, that guy will grow to suck, anyway. but the right high/highs, and hes putting up 20 ppg for you as a junior.
so, its all about finding the gems ASAP, and getting on them early - they are usually not attractive enough at a glance to be worth fighting for. there are a ton of guys who look roughly as good at that level, but the sub potentials make all the difference in the world. you can get quality BCS players at a mid majors if you work it, even with D prestige. i built a team with half a budget (used the other half for recruiting experimentation), which goes to show how little money matters - it was like a d+ school, and in the 4th season, with all the half budget recruits, we pulled an elite 8, and the sim made the NT the next year, and i think was doing pretty good the following year, too. we had like 3 bigs who most big 6 schools would look at and be happy to have. hell, i had a south carolina team about to win a championship, and i wished i could take one or two of those bigs over to that team. those guys werent good as freshman, but as juniors and seniors, they were awesome! of course, that elite 8 run was some major luck, but for an experimental only team, with half a budget, to pull high end big 6 bigs - i think it says a lot about the effectiveness of scouting far and wide, and then using lots of evals, early as possible.