On Feb 11, 2016, at 10:42 AM, JunoGator <broadreachfsc@earthlink.net> wrote:Last year wasn't much better for McElwain, who was hired just two months before signing day 2015. The Gators signed five of the state's top 50 recruits in 2015 compared to Florida State's 10 and Miami's three.
I think that it is important to consider the IMG effect.
IMG is a recent sports-centered prep school. Typical students are elite football prospects that need a 5th year of high school to achieve eligibility, or top athletes locked into a local public high school that may not have the top-level coaching that they feel they need to become big time Div 1 prospects and - hopefully - NFL players.
It literally is an all-star roster, and 15-20 of Florida's elite 50 in the last few years have all been from IMG Academy.
UF has never signed an IMG player.
However, by and large, those players are not really Florida students. They have come from all over the country. If a student from Ohio, who has been recruited by the Buckeyes his entire life, spends one year at IMG and then signs with OSU, it is not truly as if Urban came into Florida and stole an in-state recruit.
The other wrinkle is that IMG's first coach was Chris Weinke. What talent existed that lacked long term ties was steered to FSU. Although he was not the coach this year, the anti-UF effect is still present.
To be meaningful, this data should exclude IMG students. I suspect that UF will have grabbed about the same non-IMG Florida top-50 as the other top schools.
What I am not seeing as much as I though I would is the Shannon effect. I expected top-tier defensive talent to flock to play linebacker for us with him as their position coach, and in-roads into Dade and Broward at other position. UM's coaching change was a golden opportunity (pun intended) for Shannon to clean up in the region, I didn't see much of an effect.
-Zeb
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