Blah. Iowa State has bigger things to worry about right now than who has the better recruiting class in 2012. The best this coaching staff can do is scout talent and try to get the best guys they can find to come to Iowa State in the best way they know how. Who cares how many recruits the Joneses have right now when we all know that by fall camp 2012, every Big XII school will have ~20 scholarship guys coming in to play?
I'm not saying that recruiting isn't important, it's just that I despise the way recruiting is reported. The only things that really matter at all are...
a) What position needs does a team have within the next two years?
b) What are the key skills to be successful at those need positions?
c) What kind of potential prospects exist that have these key skills?
d) How well developed are the key skills of those athletes?
e) At the end of the day, was the team successful in fulfilling those needs?
Anything beyond that is rubbish in my opinion. Position rankings? How do you directly compare a pro style quarterback from Baton Rouge, LA to a spread style QB from Buffalo, NY? The correct answer is that you can't, and anybody who thinks otherwise doesn't understand that there are intricacies to the offenses and defenses of college football. You let coaches determine what they are looking for, do the footwork, and come up with the best players they can find.
We could find who one recruiting website thinks is "the best linebacker of the 2012 class," then find reasons why he could be fantastic at Iowa State and average at Texas A&M. Why? Because linebackers have different tasks in different systems. Then, after we hash that out, we could go to another website, find their top linebacker, and start all over again.
And then there are class rankings. On top of having these different expectations of what each position player is trying to do on the field, they all have different guys graduating at different times from different positions. It would be one thing if class rankings asked, "Who filled their needs with the exact type of athletes they are looking for, and how developed are skills of their recruits?" But that's not the case. Instead, we have these websites grossly oversimplifying the recruiting process into a question of "Who is the best, and what school got them?" Until that changes, I will follow Iowa State's commitments and offer my opinions of them, check in on the other Big XII schools to see what they have coming in on signing day, and that's about it.
Wow, that turned into a rant.
