Well, checking the Rivals recruiting site I find that for 2016 Ohio, Ball State, Central Michigan, Northern Illinois, Bowling Green, Marshall and Toledo all together are showing one committed recruit. Western Michigan is already showing eight. Damn.

USC & Texas together have seven. Alabama has four, OSU and FSU do show seven and ten respectively. What is it that Ohio, Ball State, Central Michigan, Northern Illinois, Bowling Green, Marshall and Toledo are not doing?

https://rivals.yahoo.com/footballrecruiting/football/recr...

Fleck's bio reflects three seasons as recruiting coordinator at Northern Illinois, 07-09. We all remember well; Jordan Lynch, Martell Moore (Atlanta Falcons), Perez Ashford (New England Patriots, Cleveland Browns and Seattle Seahawks), and Cameron Stingily. This guy recruits like no one else. Yikes.

http://www.wmubroncos.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=4600...

I'm surprised no one took him last year, honestly. It's very clear that he's an outstanding recruiter. I guess they are waiting for him to prove he can coach, too? Either that, or he's being very picky about what job he takes at the P5 level, and wanting to make sure he gets one where he is sure to succeed.

He certainly is quirky. He's young. He's fun. He's excitable and thus exciting. And, it appears he and his staff can coach. More there than just tweets and catch phrases. WMU is getting rewarded for being brave enough to hire a quirky guy. Will his personality become endearing or grating? Time will tell. In the right place, it will become endearing.

They play Michigan State and Ohio State next year. Hope they do well.

Fleck regime at WMU has validated everything I've said a MAC school could be. A MAC school can go out on the national scene and sign a Top 50 recruiting class. They can pay the HC a MWC sized 800,000 salary. Some of the posters on here think that ohio should be trying to lure the recruiting coordinator or Army for 80k. Pay him like Grobe and he will perform like Grobe! It sounds very exciting.

What in the world is going on here? We are now measuring our success by WMU standards? Whatever success is achieved by rowing your boat up there will be a flash in the pan. We are trying to build a football PROGRAM at OHIO, not a short-term cult of personality. Fleck strikes me as something like a smooth talking snake oil salesman out of some grade B movie depicting the Wild West. Anyone want to bet on the outcome of this fall's WMU game here in historic Peden Stadium, otherwise known as the Wrigley Field of College Football?

As I mentioned to Alan when he was discussing the chance we have 4 sellouts, I think WMU this year is going to be a very big game and a very tough one to win.

This is where I guess I get to say my expectations were that by year 10, OUr staff wOUld be recruiting exactly the way Fleck is. Veteran staff, stable, winning games. Yet somehow, WMU is pretty far ahead of everyone in the MAC when it comes to recruiting the last couple of years. Now the question is can they win really big? I know one thing, OUr staff would win big with those kinds of recruiting classes.

bcat2 . . . he's selling snakeoil. He'll be leaving Dodge soon, and the remedy will prove to be transitory. Others disagree strongly, and would prefer to have a string of three-year coaches who sell their snake oil and then move on to new more lucrative fields of endeavor. I, for one, prefer the model that we have developed at OHIO. I suspect that when Frank is ready to hang it up that he'll groom an assistant as his replacement and we'll have a smooth transition. This next HC may very well be someone who has been here long enough to put down roots and will, like Frank, make it a career and not a stepping stone to the P5. That's my hope, at least. We'll see what actually happens.

It is a truism not only in coaching, but in all jobs, that there are some people that are just very good salespeople, and there are others that are good at the underlying skill, in this case coaching. It's a rare person that is good at both, and those tend to rise quickly.

If you can't have both, and most of the time you can't, which is better? A guy that is a good coach with a little sales ability, or a guy that can sell with a little coaching ability? For most jobs I think there is a consensus that the former is by far the better choice. The good coach can hire a recruiting coordinator that can sell, and then slowly build his program and reputation from a solid foundation, and then in time the quality of the recruits rises because players want to go there, not because they are sold to go there.

The good salesman can, of course, surround himself with good coaches, and that can work, too, but more often than not, those types seem to crash and burn. We were all wondering a year ago if Fleck would do exactly that - crash and burn. Had he had a second season like his first, he likely would have been gone, despite the good recruiting. At this point, though, it appears he can coach some, too, so he's virtually certain to be hired at the end of this year with another good season.


As you say, the one of the big disadvantages of the salesman approach is that they come, and they either crash and burn, or they leave. There's no reason for them to worry about building things like IPFs or Academic Centers because, by the time they are built, the coach will be gone anyway. Another thing I think we can all agree on is that, regardless of what people think about Frank as a coach, he has done a tremendous amount in the way of building a program, and a football culture at Ohio. If you go back to his 2005 comments, his comments indicated that he intended to try to actually build a program at Ohio, and he thought it could be done, I think he has done exactly that.

Whether you look at facilities, or you look at things like fan support, and student support, or you look at national attention to the Ohio program, it's all gotten better at Ohio under Solich. I actually think that's one of the reason for many of the attacks he gets. People that want to see football dropped completely despise the fact that he is building a program, or they are upset that he takes focus off of basketball, where the would rather see the focus.

In any case, Ohio is making progress year after year, and the results are tangible and indisputable. The facilities has improved, recruiting has improved, and fan support has improved. I suspect that alumni giving has grown, too, but I don't have any numbers on that, so it's just a guess. Ohio is clearly poised to do well in the years ahead.

I agree 100%

Just because Fleck, or some other coach, is a salesman, it doesn't automatically make them snake oil salesmen. To me, saying that someone is a "snake oil salesman" implies they are selling something that isn't quite true, or isn't quite ethical. Fleck has an ebullient personality, and he is very young, and seems to be able to connect with some of these kids, and that alone might account for his recruiting success. There is nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, if he's saying "Oh, I'm here at WMU for life", that would be snake oil, as it's likely not true.

By the way, it's worth pointing out that Ohio/Solich has had reasonable success recruiting against Fleck. In cases where both schools have offered, and the player chose one or the other (as opposed to choosing some other school), Ohio has won more than half the time. Ohio has been recruiting very well the last three years, too.

It works that way sometimes, and other times schools with a new coach every four years may find themselves wandering in the wilderness for a prolonged period (such as Ohio in the 80's and early 90's, Miami in the last 8 years or so, Akron for a decade, EMU for however long).

The better the core foundation, the less apt a school is to be down for a long, long time for a couple reasons. First, they have competitive facilities, making it easier to get better coaches, and for those coaches to recruit. Second, they have more of a tradition, and "top of mind awareness", also making it easier to recruit both coaches and players.

That's the process that began at Ohio under Grobe, and which has continued and accelerated under Solich, the building of that core foundation. Ohio has been building facilities, as Wes has mentioned, and they have built a tradition of winning and going to bowls. Ohio and "winning at football" are becoming synonymous. We also saw from that zipcode map that was posted here awhile back that Ohio is building a fan base, and that support is slowly creeping northward and westward, and they are becoming a strong second choice for SE Ohio fans. I'm pretty sure that we can all agree that as a result the situation will be better for the next coach than it was for, say, Lichtenburg, it will be more likely he will do well, and less likely that Ohio will return to the pattern of the 80s and 90s.