There’s absolutely no reason we can’t pull enough top talent to compete at the highest level of college football. It will take some time, but a major southern city like Louisville that also has easy access to Cincinnati, St.Louis, Indianapolis, Nashville, Chicago and Atlanta to go with strong ties in Florida should not lack for quality dudes. It’s going to simply take a coach willing to be here for more than a few years. Hell, even Porky Stoops has UK recruiting well and it’s simply because he’s been there.
Here is the top 10 classes in order, currently on Rivals
Clemson
Georgia
Alabama
LSU
Ohio State
Texas A&M
Florida
Auburn
Oregon
Michigan
1. We have recruited to be able to “compete” at the highest level with those team, but to sustain and be a playoff contender regularly it’s an uphill battle.
2. Look at that list and tell me how we should expect to ever compete with teams like that in recruiting? The teams in there have been doing it for years and have established brands/names. They have 90k-100k fans showing up for games.
And that list doesn’t even have teams like Notre Dame, USC, Florida State, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Tennessee, etc that can have an average class and usually still get a top 25 class.
Here are the playoff teams during the 6 years of the playoff
Alabama 5
Clemson 5
Oklahoma 4
Ohio State 3
LSU 1
Georgia 1
Oregon 1
Florida State 1
Michigan State 1
Notre Dame 1
Washington 1
That list shows that maybe we can hope one day to get a good year like a Michigan State or Washington. But just looking at the talent/results.
We aren’t in a great area for recruiting. Louisville has some decent players in the city, but it’s not a football town. Most years we don’t even have a 4 star come out of the city where a bigger city down south just has them coming out left and right.
And yes we can go to Florida, St. Louis, etc., but when you leave the state to go to those areas you’re fighting everyone.
Recruiting at that level is hard and it’s easy to just say “we should be doing this easy”, but that’s disrespectful to the coaching staffs. We fight and recruit hard, but are just at a disadvantage. I don’t want to create unreasonable expectations of coach Satt. Let’s move into consistent top 25-30 classes first and see where we go from there.