I also think it is only fair to criticize the recruiting ability of this staff as well. Yes, we are not a blue blood...but that's not the only reason we didn't land Devyn Ford. A lot of factors go into a recruit picking his school. We just couldn't maximize our advantages in comparison to the other schools.

And that's not to say that our staff did anything "wrong" with Ford's recruitment either. Sometimes you can send all of the flowers, love letters, etc to the pretty girl you want...as well as treat her right, take her to fancy dinners, and be the nice guy. But in the end, she can still choose the charismatic, funny guy to be with. It's not always just how "hard" you work...or even how good you look (i.e. perception).

Despite not being a blue blood, we had a LOT of advantages when it comes to Ford that gave us a chance to go toe to toe with the big schools. RB is a HUGE position of need for us, and Ford would be THE man at VT (and early on). He knows this, but is still going to choose PSU. That's a helluva sell job by Franklin and staff...especially with the depth at RB they already have...to pull an OOS kid like this. Franklin is a great recruiter...and this is in ADDITION to him being at a blue-blood school like PSU.

We're not going to win many battles against the blue bloods, but that doesn't mean we should rationalize losing all of them. Especially for critical positions where we offer a lot of early playing time. We need to be better at recruiting to help us overcome the gaps there are between our programs and others. We won't win most of them, but we need to win the critical ones as much as we can.

This means putting more "salesmen" on our staff for recruiting purposes. People who have that ability to connect to recruits, even if they aren't as great at player development. IMO, we have a good enough staff for that already (one of the Fuente's strengths). Any new/replacement hire we have should be focused on that. For once, I want to land a recruit where everyone else says "Why in the hell did that recruit pick VT?".

I believe Fuente's strength is coaching/development, but his weakness is recruiting/salesmanship. Pretty much what we knew from the beginning. It's up to him to start finding new ways to make VT more attractive, because we are not going to turn into a blue blood overnight (donations, facilities, stadium size, etc).

We will still be (very) good with Fuente IMO. But I do worry what will happen when Bud Foster retires, and we still lack that gamebreaker on offense. Or have sub-elite talent on defense that Bud can't turn into a top 15 defense year in and year out.