recruiting board update

A smallish update, so preceded by a couple loose ends.

First, obviously, in about half an hour (as I type this) we'll find out if we have anything for Stephen Strasburg. If I'm Brian O'Connor, which I'm not, every runner becomes an opportunity to manufacture a run. The hit-and-run and sacrifice bunt ought to be applied liberally. You can't sit back and wait for a big inning like the kind we got in the ACC tournament. Never happen against this guy. The coach has got to be active.

TLx4's Bird left some comments on the coaches poll post yesterday which sort of dovetail nicely with a few things I left out. In order....

First, let me start by saying that I knew the guy that used to fill out Chan Gailey's poll ballots when he voted. He said Chan would only really put in his input for the final poll but was mostly too busy during the season to worry about it.

This brings up an excellent point; namely, the coaches don't even bother with this shit. It's a common joke that the ballots are filled out by a graduate assistant or the team secretary or someone. How much truth there is to this joke, I don't know and very few people really do, but obviously there is some. If the coaches can't be bothered, why are they so insistent on having a poll in the first place?

1) The coaches don't want to be dragged up and down the street when their ballots show conference/regional/irrational biases.

Then don't show irrational biases. Conference and regional biases are less easy to get rid of, because you tend to think the people you play are really damn good, but like I said yesterday, part of being a head coach is being dragged up and down the street. In real life, with privileges come accountability; the coaches apparently feel above this.

2) To protect coaches from their conference offices for not voting their own teams into BCS games. It keeps the poll less political by making sure no one is obligated financially to make a decision that will determine the BCS lineup. Imagine the pressure Mack Brown'd get from the Big 12 office to vote straight Big 12 teams if they actually could see his ballot.

Something that shouldn't happen, to be sure. But to me, transparency trumps this sort of thing. And if there are lot of, say, Big 12 coaches punching a lot of Big 12 tickets, the ability for the rest of us to see what's going on can keep the conferences honest too. If a conference really does put effective pressure on its voting coaches, it won't take long before some intrepid reporter asks, "hey, how come all the ballots have Florida and USC at the top, except for the Big 12 ones which have Oklahoma?"

OK, that done, and it's time for the rather skimpy recruiting board update.

- Off the board are LB Ty Linton (to UNC) and DE Jordan Paskorz (to Michigan) as well as DE Dakota Royer, who dropped us.

- New on the board is S Darius Lipford, a Duke commit who's looking around. ($) He'll stay red until such time as he decommits from Duke, which seems very possible.

- Moved up to blue are OT's Miles Dieffenbach and Khamrone Kolb. I'm still not really sold, exactly, on our chances with Dieffenbach, and considered moving him to yellow instead (he was red before) but a top four is a top four.

- Dropped to red is WR Adrian Flemming.

I have a feeling Paskorz isn't the first recruit we lose to Michigan. Ken Wilkins and Marcus Rush are going to be in Ann Arbor this weekend and I think at least one of the two, leaning toward Wilkins, will commit then and there.

That's it for today, folks. Enjoy the baseball this weekend.