Football Camp Putting Recruiting Board
In Holding Pattern
Tweet of the Day
In Holding Pattern
If you regularly follow my blog, you know that I have what has turned out to be an ambitious goal of creating a recruiting board and going through each position group to identify needs and recruiting targets. With football camp in full swing, it will be easier to wait until it is over. New recruiting targets emerge in camp, so I am going to wait until next week to get that train back on the tracks.
Big Man Basketball Recruit
Kaleb Tarczewski on Campus
 |
| Kaleb Tarczewski |
Kaleb Tarczewski just completed a two day unofficial visit to Chapel Hill. Tarc is our number one big man target at the moment as he is only one with an offer. While the seven footer came into the visit a Kansas lean (he has visited Kansas three times in the past year) that may have changed in the past 48 hours. I don't have any insider info on this one, but the word on the street is that he really enjoyed his time in Chapel Hill and meshed really well with the team. The combination of the majesty that is Chapel Hill, a future with two of the best point guards in the non-professional game (Kendall Marshall/Marcus Paige) getting you the ball in a position to succeed, the available playing time, and the team chemistry are what separate us from Kansas, but the most important aspect of his visit may be the timing. UNC's basketball camp is revving up and that means the return of numerous former players and the legendary summer pick-up games. If you are a serious basketball player (Tarc is as he works with a former NBA big man coach and improved his game exponentially) there is no way that doesn't make an impact. Tarc has a visit scheduled with Arizona and will commit in August. Good vibes . . . .
Tweet of the Day
KButter5 Kendall Marshall
FAKE --- RT @RealHB_40: ahhhh woke. @KButter5 whats up?
I have come to understand that there are certain things in the world that I will never understand like why is it so easy to get a driver's license. There are too many bad drivers on the road and I am not talking to the aggressive drivers out there. Nope. Its people who drive like my Mom. You'll recognize her. She is the lead car in a twenty car caravan heading down a two-lane highway at a minimum of ten mph below the speed limit. Yep. That's her. Love you Mom, but take the bus.
Another thing I won't ever understand is pretending to be someone you're not. This is a broad statement applicable to many situations, but lets limit it to twitter. Quick rhetorical question. Why create a fake twitter account and hold yourself out as Harrison Barnes. That is pathetic. "Too many Urkles on your team that's why your winslow." DOUCHE FAIL!
We have a new Summer's Eve champion!
Apologies
I want to apologize for my post last week. I have learned a valuable lesson. Never draft a post and make it public all within a 30 minute lunch break. Editing FAIL.
What? You thought it would be about something else? Yeah. You're right. On closer inspection, I should narrow the lesson learned. Never draft a post that may be quasi-controversial over a quick lunch because you really suck at self editing, especially immediately after writing something. Much better. Hey. It is important to know and understand your own limitations.
My post last week caused a little bit of a Rutg-kus! Oh man! I never cease to amaze myself. Ok. My post ended up memorialized on the free board at Inside Carolina. Here is the link if you are interested in reading it:
Now. I would like to thank Houselt88 for the love (and memorializing my pathetic grammar and sentence structure).
It was interesting to read my post on a message board. Beside my awful command of the English language, the thing that struck me was that the videos really make the post. My words aren't nearly as entertaining without the visual aids and the Half-Baked F-You motif got lost in translation. Yeah, I know. Sad face.
Now, what commenced was an interesting dialogue that involved a couple of the Scarlet Knight faithful. I found it interesting that ABRO1975 was incredulous about the binder. The binder is/was in fact presented to recruits that were seriously considering UNC. I want to point out that part of the reason he was so incredulous is because he didn't think that Rutgers and Schiano would do such a thing. Neither did I. I thought I artfully identified why I didn't think Schiano would stoop such depths in the previous post and I am not going to rehash that again here. Recruiting is a gray area and schools do things that alumni and fans would not be proud of all the time. It is the nature of the beast.
The bottom line is it comes down to a classic choice of sales technique. Do you emphasize your positives or do you rip your competitors.
At UNC under Butch Davis, I know for a fact that the emphasis is on the positive. Does that mean that a negative thing has never been said about another team to a recruit? No. I would be a fool to think that.
Recently, Brandon Greene, a 2012 OT from GA and Bama commit, said that North Carolina along with South Carolina and Auburn have been coming after him pretty hard on the recruiting trail despite his commitment. The author of the writeup characterized it as negative recruiting. I don't know if I would go that far, but he is a verbal commitment of Bama and UNC is still in pursuit. Apparently, the collective schools are questioning the size of Green's role/playing time and how he is going to fit into the game plan of Bama.
Would you define this a scrupulous behavior? I am a lawyer, so my answer is, it depends. In case you didn't know, lawyers never give you straight answers because that is how we make our money. I don't think there is anything wrong with staying in contact with a recruit that you have an open dialogue with. If his commitment was that firm (which its not as he almost reopened it), he would not take or return the calls or messages. My point, however, is that I believe schools try to engage in behavior that is in accordance with the expectations of its fan base. In the SEC, a win-at-all-costs mentality persists and it is embraced by those fans. I have SEC friends that literally told me that a recruiting coordinator should be fired if he didn't create a binder. At Carolina, we would prefer to think that the value of the education, the quality of student life, and our coaching staff's history of success with player development are sufficient selling points for the coaches to work with. At Rutgers, I have to assume they have a similar belief and, for the most part, they may well be correct. However, don't be naive. Recruiting can be an ugly business, especially for a coach mired in a 4-9 season. Just because you expect better, doesn't mean it is the reality.
Also, I would like to address this idea of an axe to grind with Rutgers. You can consider the last post an expression of frustration. The NCAA cloud has been hanging over Chapel Hill for almost a year, but the crepuscular rays are filtering through. I can't imagine there will be a renewal of the home-and-home series after the binder incident. I don't have any inside information, just a feeling that Butch's attitude toward Schiano has changed after watching a post-signing day presser with Coach Davis. Therefore, the only thing of significance with Rutgers for UNC football is the recruiting battles. With Coach Mo recruiting New Jersey, we will be in the mix for several guys year in and year out. While we will loose more than we will win (that is the nature of the beast when you go into someone's back yard), we will win enough to irritate the Rutgers' staff. Until Rutgers establishes a presence in NC that is more their problem than ours. The frustration of the previous post flows from the sea of misinformation pedaled by the media and our exposure to that misinformation. It flooded the Tar Heel Nation, gave the fans of neighbor schools ammunition to needle us in our offices, and opposing staffs material to create doubt in the minds of recruits. All of this while we watched an admirable 8-5 season with the thought of "what could have been" in the back of our minds.
When you have three schools in such close proximity, the media pushes ink by attacking whatever school is showing weakness at the moment. After this past year, the most important thing I have learned is to read the news skeptically and investigate the facts for yourself. It was very disappointing to see some of the things being reported as fact by reputable newspapers and media outlets. Having never been alive during an NCAA investigation at a school I cared about, I always took what the media said as fact. I will never again make that mistake. While I have come to expect the nasty of negative from NCSU and VT as well as their fans, Rutgers just took the ultimate advantage by gathering all that misinformation in one binder and giving it to prospective recruits and I, honestly, didn't expect that from Schiano. In adversity, you find the truth.
When you have three schools in such close proximity, the media pushes ink by attacking whatever school is showing weakness at the moment. After this past year, the most important thing I have learned is to read the news skeptically and investigate the facts for yourself. It was very disappointing to see some of the things being reported as fact by reputable newspapers and media outlets. Having never been alive during an NCAA investigation at a school I cared about, I always took what the media said as fact. I will never again make that mistake. While I have come to expect the nasty of negative from NCSU and VT as well as their fans, Rutgers just took the ultimate advantage by gathering all that misinformation in one binder and giving it to prospective recruits and I, honestly, didn't expect that from Schiano. In adversity, you find the truth.
Besides, if there is an axe to grind, there is always September 10.
No comments:
Post a Comment