Brooklyneagle {l Wrote}:I'm afraid EagleDave is right. Hard for BC to adjust to a landscape where most schools' recruits are academically unprepared for anything but hanging around for four or five years in some "sports management" or "apparel" major -- which is but one aspect of what Dave is talking about. Another much discussed here is, of course, facilities. Leahy and Co. are just in revolt against a reality that doesn't fit their worldview. But they can't go home again.
I was more talking about the generalities of recruiting and style of play, but this is true also. My overall point was that, purely from a program building standpoint, BC is LIGHTYEARS behind everyone else. Christ, even Wake fucking Forest just built a new IPF.
BC fans like to scoff at recruiting services and star ratings because guys like Tom O'Brien and Tom Coughlin made them look like idiots for the better part of two decades. They did it by finding under recruited guys, redshirting them as freshman and building them into studs. That's a strategy that simply doesn't work anymore because there are so few true hidden gems in the era of Hudl, social media, showcase camps and the 24/7 news cycle. If you can play, even a little bit, schools from all over the country will find you now.
It's why recruiting budgets have exploded and programs have insanely sophisticated recruiting systems (to say nothing of the booster $$$ flowing through the superpowers). BC literally has one guy on their staff right now that could get a job at a high level program where recruiting is placed above all and that's Al. He's gone out into untapped areas for BC and found some of the best kids we've had the last few years. The problem is that every successful program has 4-5 guys just like him. Addazio has Al solely because he played here.
Realistically though, very few staff's could recruit high end kids to BC right now. It's so easy for a competing program to show off their new facilities, which make ours look even worse than the embarrassment that they already are, and to talk about their own institutional commitment to the sport vs. ours (remember BC as the lone dissenting vote to paying COA?). That doesn't even mention that we're trying to recruit kids to a program that's stuck in the 1970's from a style of play standpoint when a lot of other schools are luring recruits by moving to a more entertaining and fun brand of football.
Academics, Menino, the neighbors and whatever other excuse BC has conjured up in the last 10 years is all bullshit. If they really wanted to, BC could turn itself into Stanford - East in a heartbeat, but the school is perfectly comfortable with a half assed commitment to athletic success as long as the ACC checks keep coming. Until that mindset changes, the hole will keep getting deeper.