Coaching and Recruiting

Recruiting is obviously very important to the success of a football program. It really helps when you're recruiting to be at a school with a great football tradition. Take top-ranked Ohio State, they have something to sell. They have something that's great in college football and that's their tradition. They are a perennial power. When they knock on somebody's door they are allowed to sit down and sell their product. A lot of schools can't do that. The top blue-chip players in the country let Ohio State, Oklahoma, USC, Notre Dame and Michigan come in. These schools can always reload and have great depth. They can recruit consistently year to year.

You know just having the right product to sell doesn't mean you can sit back and they fall out of the sky and are going to land at the LA Coliseum in Los Angeles. You've got to go make it happen. Maybe those guys didn't work as hard as Pete Carroll, maybe their assistant coaches are better evaluators. Maybe they all sat down in a staff room with all of them and decided on the bright players to recruit and everyone had a voice and say in it and had someone make a final decision. That's the only way you can run a program, you cant let Carter Blank just a coach go out and offer a kid a scholarship and no one else ever see him. It has to be a staff effort, a staff decision, and you've got to have these evaluators, then someone pull the trigger on them.

Every coach has to go out and work. You still need to make it happen. The only way you can run a program is the staff has to evaluate and make team decisions. John Blake did a good job recruiting at Oklahoma. He didn't have a strong offensive staff around him, but he did have talent. The most important thing is to have talent. I don't care how good of a coach you are, if you don't have good players you're not going to win. That's why my attitude was always, I'm going to be a great recruiter because I don't want to test my coaching abilities.


The Barry-CS
5 Boston College - not as athletic as other top teams
4 Oklahoma - young football team that hasn’t reached its potential
3 Oregon - they could move into the #2 spot shortly
2 LSU - despite them losing games because of poor coaching decisions
1 Ohio State - Lee Corso says people question their defense, but that may be a "hangover" from last year's National Championship loss to Florida.


Hear Coach Switzer every Monday and Friday on XM Sports Nation This Morning with TJ Rives from 730-9am Eastern time. The show airs on XM Sports Nation, XM 144. For more information go to xmradio.com