Tuesday, January 24, 2012

2013 recruiting board

It's time to unveil next year's recruiting board.  It is below for your perusal.

By now you probably know the drill.  A prospect on here has to be listed as offered by UVA on at least two or three of the major recruiting sites.  (Two will probably do if it's a prospect close to home, in Virginia or Maryland - or if those two sites are Rivals and 24/7, the more thorough of the four big ones.  Others require three.)  Not any ol' prospect goes on the board - I do have space limitations.  They don't make it if:

- They're only listed by one site, or only two if one is only semi-trustworthy.
- The size of the offer pile means UVA doesn't seem to rate a second thought.

Even the guys in red (as of now, January) it's conceivable, albeit unlikely by my guess, that they could choose UVA.

Grains of salt are issued standard to every reader.  One reader requested, when the 2011 class was signed, to see the original 2011 board, for comparison's sake.  To see how the various colors on the original listing played out.  I didn't have that, but I decided to keep the original 2012 board (and have kept this one separate too) and you'll get to feast your eyes on it next week during the February 1 Signstravaganza.  Sneak hint: of the four colored sections, this is the breakdown:

- 2 of 4 blue prospects committed to UVA
- 2 of 7 green prospects etc.
- 0 of 9 and 0 of 7 yellow and red etc. etc.

For the non-math-majors, that makes four of an original 27 prospects that ended up committed.  I spent a lot of last year just adding guys directly to the committed section, because that's the way the year went.  At least half the class went straight to orange without passing Go or any other color.  Hence the salt.

In a likely futile attempt to fix that, I tightened up my internal criteria for starting off blue or green and made the yellow section pretty huge as a result.  Therefore the dominance of yellow and red shouldn't frighten you.  In fact I think 2013 will be an absolutely magnificent year for Mike London on the recruiting trail.  We have lots of things going for us:

- It's an odd year, which for some reason have always been better.  This means nothing, but still.
- A breakout season on the field; the results of a particular season always seem to manifest themselves most with that year's juniors.  Unlike the seniors, they're only just beginning to form their impressions.
- Mike London.
- Iron balls, as evidenced in the much-talked-about letter that the staff sent to juniors around the state that read, as paraphrased, "By the time you get this, we will have already upset Georgia Tech.  By the way, come play at Virginia."

So it should be a fun recruiting season.  Keep your hands and arms inside the carpet.

Latest updates:

-- Moved OG Brad Henson and CB Hipolito Corporan to maroon.

-- Added OT Eric Smith and LB Connor Wingo-Reeves to orange.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Going to be a big recruiting year. They have to carry the momentum of the first two seasons on the field and off the field, but it's also critical to come up with some high impact pieces because, due to the last two classes, we'll likely have a small class or two coming up. Add in a strong in-state class, and it's as big a recruiting year as there has been in recent UVA history.

The tough part is that there are a lot of young guys on the 2-deep now, and a lot of the 2012 class will be redshirted, so guys in the 2013 class may have to show some patience.

That said, I think we need to land one of the state's top QB talents. Rocco should be a good ACC QB in 2013, but we should be able to sell guys on fighting for PT as soon as 2014.

Impact talent in general should be prioritized, but defensive backfield guys and OL will be critical. Kelby Johnson may be good, but it'd be nice to get a top talent or two to follow Moses/Aboushi in the way that those two followed Monroe/Albert, and how Eugene/Branden followed D'Brick and Brad.

A big RB might be nice, as Richardson should be a junior by then, so getting someone in the pipeline is important now that we missed on Brown and Cross.

I'd love to get Jon Allen and potentially pair him with Eli Harold for 2-3 years, with Mike Moore and Co. inside.

Anonymous said...

Doubt we can take parker. His grade are apparently way south of the mendoza line.

Stuart said...

I recently started reading and came to this post by way of today's post. The letter we sent to Georgia Tech Sounds amazing. "By the time you get this, we will have already upset Georgia Tech. By the way, come play at Virginia." God I love Mike London.

Does anyone know where I can find the actual text of that letter, I'm curious to bear witness to the swagger first hand.

Brendan said...

Don't know the actual text, you'd probably have to ask a recipient honestly. I just paraphrased.