That has been the message for 10 years... head coaches are more important than ever in "closing" the deal. Fuente is struggling to sell his stock, clearly. Especially for top players, the top whistle ultimately closes the deal. And Fuente, for whatever reason, has not done that and cannot do that. Blame whatever you want, but he is ultimately responsible for that IMO.

My view is that he cannot escalate recruiting on a consistent basis. That started with the very "first" class when he couldn't close any of his alleged 5 guys. Every coach gets a new coach bump but somehow we missed that. It was really surprising. Since then, we have recruited consistent with Beamer's "averages" or slightly above Beamer's averages (on the whole). That was surprising to me and I think we have a sufficient sample size to confirm that it is very very unlikely to change. Especially given the messaging coming from various recruiting pockets about Fuente and his undesirable approach.