Funny you don’t mention winning as something you’d be excited about, but rather, “top 10 recruiting classes.” I will remind you that Franklin only ever had one of those. I think you’re right, we do need lots of improvement in NIL and structural support to build big time rosters as far as recruiting service rankings.
But what’s becoming very clear is that Matt Campbell and his staff are FAR better at scouting and identifying talent than the recruiting services—and most college football coaches, for that matter. It’s crazy to see the number of guys he brings in the other schools and services missed that have a huge and immediate impact!
Caleb Bacon was a walk-on from small-town Iowa and kicked off his PSU debut as Big Ten co-defensive player of the week. Josiah Zayas is challenging one of our best defensive backs of the decade for playing time. Amarion Jackson is lighting it up at WR after switching positions. Trevor Buhr is one of our best offensive linemen. Brock Riker is another he snatched from Texas State and already appears years more experienced than he actually is. Kooper Ebel looks cut from the same cloth as our old-school legendary linebackers like Poz, Connor, Lee, etc. And these do not appear to be one-off flukes. He keeps finding these guys over, and over, and over.
So yeah, if Campbell can recruit like this, I’m more than happy with that. The thing is, Franklin used to recruit like this too. He and his staff trusted their eyes and put out offers to guys with potential that they knew would fit their style. McSorley was recruited at defensive back to most schools but they liked him at QB. Saquon Barkley was a 3-star committed to Rutgers. But Franklin’s Achilles heel was “image.” He believed that if PSU could look the part, they’d become the part. That was the reason for his suit and sunglasses during game day entrances. The lonnnng press conferences with lots of fancy stats and facts about the other team. Much of the facility renovation, while functional and very needed, was also about making PSU look sleek and modern. So naturally, once they started experiencing success, he and the staff stopped trusting their eyes when it came to recruiting. They simply looked at the recruiting services and went after the highest rated guys they could get—whether or not they were a fit for the system and whether or not they truly deserved their rating. He wanted to boost PSU’s recruiting image with star ratings (though again, most of his being a good recruiter was self-proclaimed as he whiffed on top 10 classes over 90% of the time). He went after flashy coordinators, whether or not their system fit the players or even his own football philosophy. Which is why every coordinator ended up at odds with him after 2-3 years. And by the end, we had a top-rated QB unable to reliably get the ball more than 15 yards downfield as he was being jammed into a horizontal rush-attack style gimmick offense…with no defensive tackles big enough to play in the big ten and only one big ten quality LB.
I think in this new era of football, recruiting services haven’t mattered less. Many of the teams desperate to snag some 5-star recruits are crumbling due to a lack of depth (paying out so much to one player rather than building a team) and entitled pansies who can’t handle adversity.
So, if you want to judge everything off of some scout who chases around 16-year-old boys at camps and bestows them some number of stars, be my guest. But I think you’re going to spend a lot of time grumbling and being miserable while Campbell builds a winning team.
