Dumb Question(s) on Crootin'

[CochiseCowbell]

Allow me a preface; I never followed recruiting until recently. For this used to be basketball season. Please make this the case again soon, Howland!

It's been mentioned time & again about how the entire OM fan base is all on the same page; promoting Oxford, the grove, the school, the team, the supposed tradition, the banners, that hammered chick in the grove, ad nauseam.

What is it that they do, as a collective, that's so much better? Many of our own seem to proclaim, with more than a hint of envy, that their "entire fan base gets it & is on board." While, in the same breath lamenting our own in-fighting as fans. No, I'm not talking about the red bags, the network, or any sanctions. I'm wondering about what "IT" is that they "get."

Is it a Prime Directive from the top? Is it a douchebag hive-mind? I'm just searching for clarification.

Long post. Sorry. I'll hang up & listen

 

[57stratdawg]

I think they're system on campus is way better than ours. Have you ever read an OM pay site when they have a big recruiting weekend? It's like a play by play.

I literally saw David Johnson post last Friday something like "the recruits had dinner on campus and are currently back at their hotel for a couple of hours before heading out for a night on the Square".

Wonder how many people went and got $500 in cash and headed to the Square then?

 

[DogStuckAtUM.sixpack]

Perception is reality.

The city, school, athletic department have done an excellent job of PR and promoting the **** out of their product. Their fans/potential customers eat it up. "Douchebag hive-mind" feeds off it. Vocal minority on social media RT and 100 emoji until their fingers fall off. "Bear at work" tells us how they are about to get a 5 star LB out of California. We read NY Times Travel articles on how Oxford is the jewel of the South.

tl;dr - It's a little bit of both. Everyone's #allin.

 

[aTotal360]

Much better organized. The whole community lines up for recruiting events. Bars, fraternities, sororities, everything is lined up. Mullen won't even make reservations at Umi. His "laid back" approach is just an excuse for laziness.

 

[TBone.sixpack]

Perception is reality.

The city, school, athletic department have done an excellent job of PR and promoting the **** out of their product. Their fans/potential customers eat it up. "Douchebag hive-mind" feeds off it. Vocal minority on social media RT and 100 emoji until their fingers fall off. "Bear at work" tells us how they are about to get a 5 star LB out of California. We read NY Times Travel articles on how Oxford is the jewel of the South.

tl;dr - It's a little bit of both. Everyone's #allin.

"Douchebag hive-mind"

BRILLIANT! Haha

 

[TBone.sixpack]

I agree with this as well.

 

[aTotal360]

You nailed it.

 

[tatedog]

Their fans, coaches, and cigar boys all care about it more than ours do. Myself included. Sorry for the honesty.

 

[KeyserSoze1999]

They (Ole Miss) runs every recruit / prospect's visit like one big Bachelor Party. Some spare $, liquor, women, and music / partying.

View attachment 2981

 

[HunterDawg]

They use big time recruits to recruit other big time recruits. Patterson has done for them what Treadwell and Tunsil did. He is already on campus and is free to talk to the recruits who visit. He is especially effective with receivers. They know he can get them the ball. They know Kelly can, too. They have watched the passing offense work and see themselves catching those balls. They tweet each other constantly. It becomes a mob mentality and a group of them go to the same school for a reason.

Can we do that? I don't know. We can't seem to get the big time bell cow early on to lead the rest of them. We have to do that.

Oh, and letting Kemdiche and Tunsil both score touchdowns this year, one in the bowl game was clever. Dumb plays at the time and playing offense got Kemdiche a concussion later on but it worked to make it look cool to recruits.

Freeze calls plays to impress recruits. He may be an *** but he understands how to play the recruiting game. We have to get on that level.

 

[RBDawg.sixpack]

Apart from what else has been mentioned by most of the previous posts, most of which I believe to be correct as well, I believe Freeze has followed more or less the same strategy in his two most successful classes. Freeze, and Ole Miss, are the absolute masters at taking advantage of relationships that have been cultivated by any means necessary. Those relationships, in 2013 it was Denzel/Robert Nkemdiche and in 2016 the Patterson brothers, led Ole Miss to landing an elite national level recruit. Once you pull in one of the biggest fish out there, the others will flock to that. And save me the Nkemdiche committed on signing day, he was Ole Miss bound all of the 2012-2013 football season. Pulling Nkemdiche and Patterson get you in doors with kids that had no interest in you previously. Once youre in, "anything" is possible. Couple those relationships that led to those classes with signing high school teammates like Jaylon Jones/Greg Little, Laquon Treadwell/Anthony Standifer, Robert Nkemdiche/Denzel Nkemdiche/David Kamara, Kendarius Webster/Charles Wiley, etc. and you get so much momentum and so many "ins" with prospects. They live and breathe recruiting, and it shows.

 

[fishwater99]

Much better organized. The whole community lines up for recruiting events. Bars, fraternities, sororities, everything is lined up. Mullen won't even make reservations at Umi. His "laid back" approach is just an excuse for laziness.

This.

 

[HunterDawg]

Yep. There is more to it than "cheating". They are not recruiting individual highly ranked players, they are recruiting groups of highly ranked players who all want to go play together. Do not underestimate the value of having the highest rated QB telling a receiver "I want you to come here. We can be great together."

It is a matter of getting the big one early and getting him to recruit others. Then it snowballs and the momentum takes on a life of its own.

Other schools do it, too. Alabama does it. It works. We have to do it. Do whatever it takes to get that first one and it is a lot easier after that. Sign the big brother of a great prospect. Hire the brother of one to coach. Just get it done.

 

[BossDawg78]

They all just flat-out worship recruits, literally....they LITERALLY worship recruits and feel compelled to pitch in in any way they can, whether it's a simple tweet, buying them a drink at the Library or hooking them up with stacks of cash.

 

[klong-dog]

Or just hooking up with them, period.

 

[tatedog]

They all just flat-out worship recruits, literally....they LITERALLY worship recruits and feel compelled to pitch in in any way they can, whether it's a simple tweet, buying them a drink at the Library or hooking them up with stacks of cash.

"buying them a drink at the Library" might be the most Ole Miss thing ever put into writing.

 

[coach66]

I think they got tired of being irrelevant for almost 50 years and decided to do

something about it and by god to their credit they have. They are driven by the stories of the old glory days from their grandparents and others and most are bought in and believe it and want to return to it, no matter what the cost. We don't have their football history and that is a big difference. With that said their history is greatly overstated but certainly much better than ours in football only.

 

[J-Dawg]

We joke about "the Network", but to an extent it is very real. They do an excellent job of getting all areas of the fan base on the same page. Think propaganda and delusions of grandeur. Someone earlier posted "Perception is reality" and this is the perfect example. They've gone all in as a fan base to the point that you'd think they were fans of a team that's won multiple nattys lately. And that rubs off on their recruits.

Boosters can't contact recruits? Please, I bet the library on a big recruiting weekend is an odd assortment of frat bros and sorority girls, athletes and 18-yr old potential athletes, and particularly creepy middle aged, out of shape men who strangely only show up on these weekends.

Perfect example of the group think is our middle-aged office secretary at work. She knows everything about all their recruits and players as if she were a 21-yr old student in class with them. No, she couldn't tell you the difference in a FB dive or a read-option, but she knows how many stars so and so is and what their class is ranked.

In summary, "douchbag hive mind" for $100, Alex.

 

[121Josey]

More like they hired an Ogre a decade ago, sucked for a few years on the field, but learned how to compete off the field in the process.

 

[Tin Cup Cowboy]

Have you ever read an OM pay site

The answer is no and I hope you have not either.

 

[HunterDawg]

We sit here and tell each other "they cheat, we don't and no one else does" and that it is all done with money, drugs and sex, and that they have this vast conspiring all powerful Network. If that stuff makes you feel better, then have at it, but it is just whiny excuses. What they do happens on recruiting trips everywhere. They aren't the only ones passing out cash, either, that is everywhere, too.

At some point we have to realize that their coaches are just doing a better job of recruiting big time nationwide talent and stop worrying about them and step up our own efforts. I am tired of this obsession with them. We need to ask ourselves why we can't recruit on that level right now and hold our coaching staff responsible (those that are still here).

Recruiting is a huge part of coaching and we need honestly evaluate where we are. We have won more games than they have recently and spent half a season ranked #1 yet is does not show up on signing day? Why?

 

[J-Dawg]

^^This as well^^. We need to pretty much quit obsessing over their recruiting tactics and start employing some of them ourselves.

 

[121Josey]

We sit here and tell each other "they cheat, we don't and no one else does" and that it is all done with money, drugs and sex, and that they have this vast conspiring all powerful Network.

Recruiting is a huge part of boosters and we need honestly evaluate where we are. We have won more games than they have recently and spent half a season ranked #1 yet is does not show up on signing day? Why?

I fixed it for ya. I'm glad that you shop on loyalty and not on price/benefits. Just because everybody something doesn't mean that everybody does it at the same quantity or quality.

 

[patdog]

Agree that we need to stop obsessing over UM's recruiting and just do a better job of it ourselves. The fact is, they're pretty damn good at recruiting right now. I do think they're probably pushing the envelope more than most programs, and it may be about to bite them in the ***. But regardless of whether it does or not, we've got to play the game a little better than we sometimes do.

 

[coach66]

I would agree he planted the seeds for what we are seeing there today with

Recruiting, good observation.

 

[BossDawg78]

Recruiting is a huge part of coaching and we need honestly evaluate where we are. We have won more games than they have recently and spent half a season ranked #1 yet is does not show up on signing day? Why?

This is probably the biggest, most important comment in this entire thread.

 

[TNT.sixpack]

Another thing that's hard to understand unless you've "lived" it, is the student body make-up. By marketing their school and figuring out the out of state tuition part, they draw a HUGE number of out of state students. A HUGE number. It results in a very different atmosphere. My son went to MSU and then ultimately transferred to UM for one year to finish out his degree. He says the social scene is simply at another level at UM. He described MSU while he was there as a 13th grade feel- "smaller feel" with some small close groups of friends - seeing the same familiar faces each day. He said from the time he arrived at UM, he literally met dozens of new peolpe every time he went out, all of them from out of state. He dated 5 different girls the year he was there and every one of them was from a different state outside of Mississippi. It wasn't that way with him at MSU - more local feel, more local students, dating local girls. So, he said if he were a football player who had no previous ties to either school (which most recruits dont unless their parents went to a school) and given all things equal (football - which isn't equal right now), he said he can see why a recruit wouldn't hesitate to pick UM over MSU after a weekend of paryting and visiting at both places. He hates to admit it and I hate to hear it, but it is what it is. Not sure how to counter that. Another example of this is from several friends I have who all have kids at MSU. Their kids routinely drive to Oxford on weekends to go out, but they said their UM friends seldom drive to Starkville. I hate hearing that, but it is what it is. Like I said, the question is what do you do about it?

 

[RocketDawg]

Somebody posted the latest statistics from the colleges in Mississippi, and with a little work you can determine that Ole Miss has 41.7% out of state students, and MSU has 29.8% out of state. So the difference isn't as huge as many like to say. The numbers do not include foreign students best I can tell (each school has about 800 foreign students).

 

[CochiseCowbell]

To clarify, I wasn't asking why they were better at recruiting. As stated, I'm no expert & have only followed it a little here & BSR since hoops went down the *******. Yet, even I can admit it appears they ARE better at it. Losing back to back Egg Bowls in blowouts says that's more than appearance.

Cheating rumors aside, I wanted to know what it meant that EVERYONE there was "all in."

Here's what I gathered from all the responses: The fact that I'm not invested in recruiting, not that I don't care, & many others like myself is in stark contrast to the students, alumni, administration, coaches, fans, town of Oxford, etc. Is it part of the problem? Is it indicative of an overall problem?

Unless you're Bama recruiting IS treating the 17-18 yr old kid like a Rock Star. Social media & hat pick press conferences have made it so. It's crazy, but it is what it is.

Winning solves everything. We win the two Egg Bowls & I'm not even starting this thread. But, no I don't think the sky is falling & I'm not melting. We used to make fun of them for winning February. Well, November fruition sucks.

 

[J-Dawg]

So basically even more reason to hate OM? Their students don't have any ties to Mississippi and thus take their talents and future economic impact back to Texas or Georgia or wherever?

 

[yjnkdawg]

At some point we have to realize that their coaches are just doing a better job of recruiting big time nationwide talent

If you change "coaches" to "money boosters", then I think you would be more accurate