#RollBobbies . . . got to stop . . . who started that?
#RollCats . . . would be much better!

Not sure what loss this is. Recruiting is a staff wide endeavor, targets and visitation schedules to schools is already complete, coaches know what they are doing and where they are going.

On the other side, I wish Ryan well. But he is getting out of coaching for his family, so that is awesome for him, it's a very taxing job. Not like he's jumping ship for other jobs.

We wish Ryan all the best. The Bobcats will find a a quality person for this position.

Of course you're assuming that (1) you can find 85 players in the portal every year who WANT to come to Ohio (not a valid assumption, especially with our current football situation) and (2) you can find 85 players in the portal every year who are good enough to be on schollie at Ohio (there's a reason why 41% of the D1A players in the portal didn't get an offer from any school, including Ohio, over the last two years). So you at least have to go through the process of recruiting HS players. And who knows, you might get a better quality of HS player because the "P"s are filling their rosters with transfers and not taking as many HS recruits. Of course, they'd be likely to move on in a year or two, but that's the new reality of life in college sports.

Wow, thanks, I had no idea what it was like in that position or the insides of OHIO Football. Thank you for enlightening me.

Not to get too into it but in my personal opinion I think one of the biggest mistakes this program has ever made was letting Michael George leave. Internal politics and differing personalities aside that guy was an absolute machine. He’s a literal genius and should probably be an engineer based on his education. Obviously he did his job as Director of Recruiting but on top of that he handled all of the coaches film, managed the film staff, knew the entire offense, defense, and special teams like the back of his hand (helped us out a ton with inputting it all into the system when we’d inevitably not know something), and did a great job at figuring out other teams signals. Obviously we can only pay MAC money but if I was running the show I would have found an extra $20,000 somewhere and considered it money well spent. It also ultimately cost us the Texas State loss in 2017 as well.

While some other MAC teams are loading up with P-5 transfers, we’re out giving offers to guys with 18 other D-1 offers. This has been discussed elsewhere I think, but it seems we have never been real big on transfers. The landscape has changed with the free agency we now see in D-1 football. Have we changed with it, or we just doing the same old thing that hadn’t worked real well in the past?

I’m not so sure that Athens is that much of a detriment to recruiting. It is definitely not for everyone, but it’s okay for some. I do think that Peden is not a great place to sell, we’re putting lipstick on a pig there. You’re right about the MAC nowadays but that’s who we’re competing against recruiting wise so the other teams have that same problem that we do.

One issue is the simple fact that we are short-staffed and out-resourced. However the single biggest issue plaguing OU athletics and their ability to recruit is the administration of Ohio University. OU is the hardest school in the conference to transfer into. You can have guys with a 4.0 GPA and not be eligible to transfer because you have to complete 50% of your degree at OU. So if you spent 6 semesters or more at your previous school and haven’t graduated then OU won’t accept you because you’ve already accomplished over 50% of your degree. On top of that, they have to have progress towards a degree. So you can’t just have completed 4 semesters and not be on track to graduate in 4 years. Frank and Tim have brought it up the food chain through the AD. An unnamed coach of another sport figured they have enough security and they had the balls to go over the AD’s head to the school. Obviously this ridiculous requirement hasn’t gotten fixed yet. In my mind I think the buck falls on the donors. I wouldn’t give a single dime to the school until this issue is addressed because we are going to struggle and struggle and struggle to compete in recruiting. As long as they can count on their annual donations from certain people like the Sook’s, the Walter’s, and a handful of others then the product isn’t going to change because those of you guys who throw a few bucks into the collection basket on Christmas and Easter don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. If those people said, “Hey I’m not going to give you guys your annual half a million dollar slush fund until you get this straightened out” then I can almost guarantee that things would change and they would change fast.

Donations at record levels? I’m not sure about that - what are they $40 million? That’s nothing in todays economy, where there are billionaires giving tens of millions every year to their schools. There are athletic departments that take in more donations than our University.

Great. You picked the lowest 2 endowments in the MAC to compare to. How about Western Michigan that just received a $550,000,000 gift to be spread over the next 10 years-the largest private gift on record to a US university?

I’ve not ever heard much about the academic restrictions you’re giving us. Very interesting to know. We must be right up there with Notre Dame and Duke in academics. Wondering how that affects our deficiencies in high school recruiting.

Merit aid starts at a 22 ACT for out of state students and a 25 ACT for in-state students. Your neighbors dog could get into OU and pick up a scholarship. This is my point is there is plenty of tuition discounting today to attract a higher profile student and its still not moving the needle. Prior to McDavis OU didn't have the foundation money to offer as aggressive discounting. The endowment was only 200 million and many more construction projects were under way at that time.