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- Nov 17, 2011
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Ehhhh, program building in general these days only lasts as long as the coach is there. We just saw Saban retire and half the team bounced. You saw that when Mario bounced from Oregon and Lanning hit the portal hard. This isn’t like the old era.All valid points.
But I pointed out that over a 3-year period, Lane Train signed 55 high school kids and 56 Portal kids. Mathematically and definitionally, that is not "program building". He fielded a team, yes. He coached them up, absolutely. They won games, indisputably.
But it's all just sand castles on the beach. There is no Ole Miss standard of excellence that can be replicated and sustained when Lane Train leaves. As I said, the "wins" will regress to the mean once he's gone. NOBODY has built Ole Miss, as a program, in decades. Ole Miss people have tossed money around for recruits at multiple points in history, and that's a great short-term solution.
But I'd prefer that Miami get back to the standard of the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s, where Schellenberger won games and JJ won games and Dennis won games and Butch won games and Larry won games (for a while).
Recruit the Portal to fill holes. That's great. But a "Portal-focused strategy" is not what Miami needs. That's like bringing sand to the beach (hey, two "beach" analogies in the same post...).
The ultimate goal is to win games. A good base of HS recruiting probably only buys you an extra year of foundation for the next coach. It’s not like back in the day where when a new guy took over, a high majority of the roster remained.
Now an extra year is still valuable, can’t dispute that but it’s not like it’s significantly better. We are in a new era of roster management. At the beginning I generally agreed that HS recruiting is the route to build a more sound program, but I feel like I myself underestimated the impact of the new portal climate(CFB free agency).