Daveisabovereproach said:
parch said:
Daveisabovereproach said:
Lastly (and I admit that this isn't really Arandas fault) I can tell you that we've had a couple recruits decommit because they know that the big 12 is not perceived as a prestigious conference. They don't want their big marquee matchup at Baylor to be versus Texas Tech or Kansas State. That just doesn't move the needle for many recruits.
I would agree all the others you mentioned are legitimate problems except for this one. If a player is good enough to legitimately believe this, there's nothing to be done on our end, because they're already being money-whipped into the SEC or Big 10. And if they're not good enough to legitimately believe this, they're not the type of person we want in our program anyway.
Recruits want to play in front of the giant crowds with huge fan bases and a conference that gets tons of attention. I don't think the big 12 is a bad conference, but again, it's the matter of perception. If I get transported back to biblical times, I wouldn't be able to barter my Google stocks for food, because their perceived value is zilch. Bottom line, it is hard to do anything about perception. I do think we want to get those same recruits, however. We already saw a couple years ago how the best of the big 12 could not compete with the best of the SEC. TCU getting destroyed in the national championship game has not done big 12 perception any favors. I'd take that Georgia team in a heartbeat
Of course, the SEC and the Big 10 are uncatchable monoliths. The stadiums, alumni bases, support systems, revenue figures and prestige (for most) are all incontrovertibly larger at those schools. My point is that it's not even worth sparing a thought, or raking whoever our coach is at the time over the coals, over the recruits who choose schools based on those factors.
If any of those things are paramount to a player in choosing a school, they were never choosing any Big 12 program to begin with.
Which leads to the other problems you mentioned. We need a coach with a very specific vision, schematically, for how to fit a mostly 3-star roster into a competitive position every week. Rhule and Briles both knew how to do this from the jump. It's pretty clear Aranda hasn't to date, and with him running the D and Spav switching the O wholesale, it's either this identity moving forward or a new coaching staff.