Hmm. Is that Delance and Reese? If so, the former transferred prior to the 2017 season. And of course Reese had been playing for Hevesy at MSU. Glad we have them both. While I haven’t been able to fathom how we’ve been unable to attract more transfer talent with our holes along the OL—you make a fair point, which is that it is his HD recruiting and player development that are the real problems.
There really hasn't been a ton of high quality OL talent in the portal, probably the one spot that hasn't offered a significant number of attractive options. I don't think anyone would argue that OL recruiting has been an issue. Development will really start to be determined this season and next year....most of his guys have been sitting behind experienced guys.
There have been well thought of transfers over the last couple of years and they haven’t come here, in spite of (or perhaps because of) our depth and other problems along the OL. For example, if you look at the 2021 247 transfer rankings, 4 of the top 30 players were offensive linemen (mostly tackles, which we need) and none were DTs. Yet we landed two perfectly good transfer DTs and no offensive linemen. I’d agree that the real problem is recruiting. (Ideally you wouldn’t desperately need transfers.) You are giving him an awful lot of the benefit of the doubt by saying that the verdict is still out on development, but ok—let’s see how we look in his fourth year. But independently of all of that, the fact that we’ve attracted no transfers other than a player he previously coached at MSU (who had fallen out with the successor staff) in spite of our needs says a lot as well.
7 out of that top 100 were OL.....that's not a lot for a position that occupies almost 25% of the positions on the field. About twice as many DL in that top 100, not even counting some guys that were DE/LB types. Proportionally it looks like OL is the smallest represented position.
Crazy, I was just listening to the Saturday Down South podcast and they speculated whether he would be the starter for UK (and concluded not likely because of the PSU transfer being legit)…wild how fast this stuff happens. I guess he could be the guy at UCF, but not cracking the starting lineup for UK is either a bad look for him or UK is about to turn some heads this season. Or they’re just both bad lol.
You guys are funny but great—good to have sunshine pumpers; good for program. Anyway, like I said, since it is all part of a perfectly implemented plan, I wish that plan had included a few more OL transfers.
I don't think that was Riley endorsing taking less high schoolers to get more transfers. I think he was just admitting that the way the math works, you will have transfers and they must be replaced with high schoolers or transfers, so the direct result is there will be fewer spots left to takes high schoolers since the implementation of the transfer portal. He did admit that in the replacement of the those transfers, other transfers will have a leg up over the high schoolers fighting to fill those transfer spots that in the past had to be filled by high schoolers.
Possible, I read it that with the 25 limit that he was going to be looking at transfers as part of each class leaving less ship's for incoming freshman. Unless they up the number where he could take 25 incoming plus transfers.
I was actually a little surprised. The whole time he was at Auburn Denny Thompson made it sound like Gus was overlooking him.
And I think the 25 is antiquated now with the transfer portal. Tennessee is effectively on the worst probation a school has seen in a long time, not imposed by the NCAA but from players voluntarily leaving. UTk will be down for a long time. There should be a mechanism to rebuild the roster after a coach leaves.
