Mike Porter
Postdoc
Posts: 3619
Loc: Los Angeles, CA
Reg: 11-21-04
|
02-17-21 10:37 PM - Post#320904
In response to PennFan10
Yikes... I'm guessing COVID lockdown times and no season (aka one less escape for us big fans) is taking it's toll.
We've run in circles on this before and no one seems willing to reconsider their positions, BUT...
While I don't always agree with everything Mike says or believes, he certainly isn't a Harvard shill (he praises Yale, Princeton, and even Brown recruiting!), and frankly he is right that Penn's current recruiting is weakness of the current staff.
That said, being honest with ourselves that Coach Donahue is not a great recruiter, doesn't mean that he isn't a great overall coach, strategist, and representative of Penn. I think he is all those things, but I also think our recruiting just is not where it needs to be for Penn to be battling every year to win the Ivy League. That doesn't mean we don't get good players or even good classes (we have, and I think very highly of 2019 class and other individual players), but we honestly miss on too many of the star quality kids and we've really missed on depth.
You can make excuses all day (I see LOTS of them in this thread), but I suggest many of you are looking at it the wrong way. It's not that Harvard, Yale, or even Princeton are always edging us out (though they surely have won more than we have).
That's far from the biggest problem. If you follow Penn's recruiting closely, you'll quickly see a very common pattern. Penn gets in early on an intriguing prospect (say their junior year), intriguing prospect gets more noticed, Penn does NOT land intriguing prospect. Penn moves on to second tier of prospects (say when they are a senior), Penn tries to land second tier prospect who is more a diamond in the rough and hopes for the best (I mean we literally had to take a Juco transfer at the last minute to have a warm body because we failed so hard on landing a big).
I think the staff does a brilliant job identifying and even getting in early with really good kids, but we have a really bad (like really bad) close rate on those first priority recruits and most of the time it is to non-Ivy schools. That is the problem in a nutshell.
If you follow who we are on in the junior year, we almost never land those kids (only a select few), whereas I often see Harvard, Yale, and Princeton closing a much larger share of their own priority targets.
Bottom line, it is a CLOSING problem, and I'm not sure this staff is setup to succeed. I'm not advocating that Penn should part ways with Donahue, but if we continue to miss on the recruiting trail I would advocate for shaking up the assistants (and I wouldn't wait long) and targeting a hungrier, more dynamic lead recruiter (would have loved to see Michael Jordan join the staff).
Take off the red and blue colored glasses, take a deep breath, and watch for the Penn recruiting patterns and you'll see it too.
I mean nychoops is super well connected, ridiculously knowledgeable, and objective (what skin does he have in the game?), yet so many of you basically dismissed his insight because it didn't match up with what you wanted to be true. It doesn't mean our current staff are lazy or bad, but are any of them true grinders who are relentlessly trying to close? I don't get that from outside looking in on our mentions, social media, etc. and again, closely is our problem.
|
