Friday, March 13, 2009

SI's Spring Ball Preview | by Jay

Just a quick heads-up: Jeff's post on Sagarin versus Rivals below was the lead-in to Andy Staples' Notre Dame spring preview over on SI.com. Very nice, and thanks to Andy for the link.

At one point, Staples says this:

This is a popular topic among Domers. Weis is either an excellent recruiter who has done a poor job developing his players, or a decent coach with below-average talent evaluation skills whose recruiting classes are chronically overrated by the Recruiting Industrial Complex.
I don't know if I would limit the universe of opinion to only those two viewpoints, however. As Jeff pointed out, although ND has under-performed its talent rating, that talent is still among the youngest in football. I think this supplies a third viewpoint to muddle Staples' dichotomy: I think it's valid to believe that Weis is a good recruiter, but that his players are young and still developing (and thus his reputation as a developer of talent is still an open question.)