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Class Impact: Zion Nelson to Miami

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krashlite1975 said:
I'm a big fan of Nelson too but let's wait til after this season to see if he's truly an elite day1/2 talent or simply an above average p5 tackle. For some reason the first play of the spring scrimmage where Deandre blew past him gives me the jeebies
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I agree here. The odds are still against him being an All ACC, AA type player this year. He'd have to take another massive step forward to make that happen.

That said, the kid has the measurables now, and he seems like one of the hardest workers, most willing to learn types. Coaches love his grit. So his floor should be his better games last season and his ceiling is very high.

If Nelson takes that step, Donaldson is healthy and fit, and Rivers gets to 2020 Nelson quality snaps, our line starts to look pretty nasty (good nasty). Scaife/Williams and Gaynor would go from our best OL starting last season to our worst.
 
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RVACane said:
@HighSeas @GOCANES05 and @Calvin gave substantive reasons for liking this take based on traits they saw on film. Those are the winners. Everyone else that bashed him was wrong about him but the overall OL recruiting concerns were legit. We hadn’t exactly filled up classes with talent on the OL at that point.
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This is the important point. The idea that this kid’s success means skeptics of our OL recruiting were wrong is absurd. The evals that matter are those of our staff and too many of our OL evals have turned out badly for a long while.

It’s easy to understand why people were skeptical of Nelson given his size, rating and other offers (or lack thereof) ... and our OL recruiting struggles at that time. So kudos to the folks who took a view based on film and were right. They actually managed to put the noise out of the picture and assess.

The interesting question to me is whether there’s a learnable point in this eval to guide future OL recruiting. If we threw out hype, stars and size and focused on development potential and attitude, might we do better overall at OL recruiting?
 
TrueFloridian said:
Nah. What I said was true. Go back and look at the guys we whiffed on if you need proof. It's still TBD how Nelson ends up. If there's an L for me to take on OL recruiting lately it's Cleveland Reed.
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I thought Reed was going to be an animal. I liked the Kennedy pickup, though I excuse that by being desperate for a LT starter that offseason. Herbert is another one I thought would turn out well. So 3 strikes for me in the past 5 classes.

It happens. We all get evals wrong. Butch, Saban, everyone gets it wrong. Especially us arm-chair scouts. That's why the top teams bring in mostly guys like Donaldson and Rivers that are very low bust rates, then find the best projection out there to fill out the class.

I like Nelson, but wasn't ga-ga over him. And we've had 2 busts already out of 4 kids, with Clark the low ceiling guy we expected he was. So I'm not sure why everyone is celebrating. And, again, he should be a decent player this year. But he hasn't come close to the dominant OT people are projecting him to be as of yet. So this is a little bit of counting chickens IMO.
 
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From hot garbage to 'i'll wait until the draft before passing judgement!'. :LOL:
 
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Everyone likes to say told you so but I was honesly quite high on the POTENTIAL here... Simply from a vid of him working out after the pick up. He was doing some clean and jerk and you could see a skinny (for OT) but with muscle and athleticism. I believe he was also getting interest from big programs at the very end as he was a late bloomer.. I think Bama made a visit to see him in person at the end.
 
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