BillySee58

your expectations on Damarcus Smith

He's been inaccurate all year. Whether he started, came off the bench, it didn't matter. 46.7% completion percentage. He's obviously got the tools, but he didn't make the most of his opportunities, and he had plenty.

Not a bad situation. I just wonder how spring would be handled in that case. Trevor Knight recently made it sound like he's going to stay at OU. I would still keep an eye on Alec Morris at Bama.

The 6'5" receiver we have listed as a commit is actually committed here for basketball. There's a shot he plays football, but he committed to Benford, not the football staff. Littrell and Benford may have a discussion about doing the dual athlete thing, in which case his scholarship would have to count towards football. I'm interested to see if he gets two QBs. Once he pops on that tape I would imagine he'll consider it. I think we'll see quite a few true freshmen on the field next season. Hopefully it's at least a fun rebuild.

And you guys are young. If you can keep Cross another year I'd be surprised if you aren't looking at back-to-back SBC crowns.

92nd in the country out of 112 qualifiers. It's not necessarily bad for a true freshman, but that's not what you said initially. I just didn't see it ever give us a spark this season like some of Tre Johnson's returns.

That's on the coaching staff to convince them that they're their guy.

I'm interested to see where he uses his scholarships in his first class. He's got a couple skill guys currently committed. Does he stick with them and trust his scheme, ask them to look elsewhere, or honor their scholarship and still bring in some of his guys. Because those are the guys who will alter what he does from a personnel standpoint.

Did he?

We're two weeks out. It looks like we'll have our guy beginning of next week. That will give him just one weekend to bring these mid-term guys on campus if we want to add some guys for spring practice. The obvious thing to watch here is quarterback. We've signed mid-term juco QBs in 4 of the past 5 classes. If Littrell wants to go that route then he already has his guy(s) in mind and will try and get them to visit the weekend before they sign. If he doesn't want to or can't get them on such short notice he could go the grad transfer route year 1 while he develops others, or else he's looking at starting someone already on the roster or a true freshman. It would be interested to see how Littrell (assuming it's him) handles the QB mess if he's just given the current guys to work with. Here are a few juco QBs we might look into: http://247sports.com/Player/Johnny-Stanton-12730 http://247sports.com/Player/Justice-Hansen-21010 http://247sports.com/Player/Jerod-Evans-85846

Most coaches do say it but it's obvious he puts an emphasis on it and gets it done. I'm not a big fan of the term "Air Raid" because I think it's a misnomer. Like you said, OU aired it out like crazy with Jason White one year, but before then and after then they had Griffin and AP, so they ran the ball. Of course I see him playing to our strengths. For the next two years it should be a lot of Wilson. After that if we get 04 Omar Jacobs then we'll throw it more, or if we have 05 Garrett Wolfe we'll run it a lot, or 02 Nate Burleson we'll throw him the ball and not concern ourselves as much as normal with spreading it out. I'm interested to see how much more he can get out of underutilized guys like Goree and Kidsy. Not expecting a dynamic O, but at least a more talent-maximizing one than the last two years.

He says intelligent things too. Refreshing.

Pretty much every interview I've seen of Littrell when he's asked about offense the first thing he says is how he likes to spread the ball around all over the field. Not going out on much of a limb, but I think that translates well to the G5 level. And he has had feature players in his offense like Gronk, Tevin Coleman, Elijah Hood, etc. But if you're going to beat good teams, especially P5 teams, you have to be able create mismatches across the field. And we all know we could use a signature win or two, among other things.

I'm not doubting that those instances didn't happen or don't inherently happen when you're perceived as basically the worst local FBS program. But the thing is, most of these coaches have said how we didn't show up at all, for anyone. Another thing the last staff was bad at was using the resources everyone has, like Twitter and the recruiting sites. So many times our staff wouldn't offer a kid until he had 15+ offers and plenty of P5s. We should see a lot of these kids early in their careers in spring practices and such before they blow up. It is tough when coaches think just any borderline D1 kid would be a good fit and might feel miffed if you don't show interest. As long as you're being mostly honest and straightforward and not saying bad lies, doing your research on the kids before you show up to the school (think @GMG24 said we asked about the Coppell kid after he tragically passed), and actually keep showing up these schools aren't going to blacklist you because you don't offer a kid other FBS programs aren't.

Great point. His track record and youth speak well to how he projects to have success here as a recruiter, but that's even more affirmation than if he had been given the job with no competition.

I said I liked the idea of adding him, not that it's likely. Lol.

Back when I was still holding out hope for Brad Smiley I noticed that Joey McGuire was listed as one of Smiley's professional references. I really liked the idea at the time of adding McGuire. And I still do.

a coach at Arlington Bowie Head coach at FW Poly coach at life high school in Waxahachie This is far from the first time our last staff has been talked about as not spending enough time at these high schools. Big reason why we had such a hard time getting kids who had options. The bar is set low for our next class in recruiting. They have to turn our reputation around to a lot of these high school coaches. Good news is won't take long if they can make good first impressions out there. Going to be a fun and busy next couple of months.

Great post

The board is going to be busier when North Carolina plays than it was for any UNT games this season

I'll let you know more in depth who redshirted and who didn't, but Kenny Buyers will be returning. He was a senior, but he had yet to use his redshirt prior to this year, so he was able to use it this year while he sat out with injury. He'll be a redshirt senior next season.

Look at the d-line signees this team had left from the 2011-2013 classes, before Patrick got here. Those guys were the third year through fifth year d-linemen, who should be your main guys on the d-line. Other than Syd Moore, who was our only high school d-lineman signed in the 2013 class, the other guys had very few or no other offers (shocker). Maybe our best DT was a true freshman who did have a good offer list and KP was able to flip from Nevada in Rod Young. Maybe KP is overrated, but I would like to see him bring in a few classes of his own guys and see our d-line with a bunch of his recruits.

Yeah, my thought has always been that the teams that pull the best classes or classes better than their school normally does are lead by great recruiting head coaches. Ace recruiting position coaches are a big, but at the end of the day the recruits are signing off to play for the head coach, and they have to really have a good impression of the HC to sign if they have options. I expect him to tap into Oklahoma. Our last staff tried but again, we just weren't winning many substantial recruiting battles regardless of area. I like Oklahoma in that it's a low exposure area, so you can get kids that aren't OU or Ok State caliber, yet are borderline G5/P5 kids who don't actually have any P5 offers.

He said "Greg White Pittman may go down as one of the worst free throw shooters in the history of our school. I thought he was a top scorer out of high school." To which I replied that he only had two D1 scholarship offers, to help put into context that college coaches did not expect his game to translate well to this level. Which it has not. But go ahead and throw shade my way. I guess it can replace your old posts of "don't question Coach Mccarney. He's the coach and you all are not for a reason," when we'd get an underwhelming commit and the "I thought this staff couldn't recruit," when he'd get a recruit with the slightest bit of merit. You were right. We were crazy to question Mccarney picking up all those kids with little or no other offers. They worked out just fine. One of those unheralded pickups even ended up being one of your all-time favorite Mean Greeners in Carlos Harris.

Early on, but that offer got pulled. That's why he wears number 2, he said. Because he only had two offers (us and UNO). CC: @eulessismore