I agree. I have a lot of respect for Iowa and Wisconsin and their player development. But something that I always got the impression of was that they actually have very good players who were simply underrated and that’s why I don’t think rankings matter. I would watch film and study guys, and Iowa flat out had better players, but I would look guys up and they’d be two stars. It wasn’t all player development. They flat out have better scouting and find guys who are under the radar. My girlfriend went to high school with Chris Borland, and I remember thinking when we played him, man that guys was underrated. He only had one offer. Wisconsin flat out scouted better and found guys like that consistently. So it’s not ALL development. A lot of these guys could actually play and were simply not well received by the recruiting services.
That’s relevant because CKW was able to take some low rated offensive line players and win with them prior to the 16’ season. We probably had a top three offensive line in the conference for a few years. But those guys were not highly rated. Will Matte, Collin Rahrig, Dan Feeney, Jason Spriggs, Jake Reed, and Dimitric camiel were all guys who got into rookie mini camps, but they weren’t highly touted and Matte/Rahrig weren’t even Wilson recruits. My opinion has been that the offensive line played will due to a combination of coaching (Frey and Wilson), but also due to the fact that all of the guys I mentioned were good players and were simply overlooked. I think that it’s more a combination of development and finding under the radar guys than it is about pure development. Throw into the mix Ralston Evans, Bernard Taylor, Peyton Eckert, David Kaminski, Jacob Bailey, and Wes Rogers and those are all guys who weren’t super highly rated, but all contributed better than the guys we have now. But having known Evans and Bailey before college, I can tel you that they were already good players and just didn’t have the ratings because they were from Indiana.
What that means is that Wilson was able to work with guys who were low rated but were very good players. It was a combination of development and the guys already having some talent. I get the impression that after the 12’ class the guys we brought in on the line were rated higher but less talented. I thought ralston Evans was better than Brandon Knight (and sacks allowed supports that claim). I got the impression that a guy who only had one Big Ten offer like Spriggs was better than Cronk. And I got the impression that Dan Feeney was better than LittleJohn or Stepniak (though LittleJohn and Stepniak had more BCS offers). So I 100% agree that coaches should be held accountable to develope the players they have, but I do get the impression that if the players don’t have a certain baseline of talent, it’s hard to work with that, and that a lot of times we underestimate how good a guy is because of a bogus rating. But do you fault CKW, because at the time he was bringing in some guys with “good ratings” and every fan out there assumed those guys would come in and play better. CKW is human too, and he probably had a bias towards improving ratings to make the Alumni happy (that’s the impression that I got), but he sacrificed getting good players to err on the side of having higher rated players.
As a player, this was obvious to me and some other guys on the team at the time. My last season was in 15’ and I got the impression that we’d be screwed in a couple of years. The summer of 15’ multiple guys who were older questioned why some of these players were even offered scholarships, but fans seemed to not care because the “ratings were improving.” But 99.9% of people would’ve erred on the side of improving ratings like CKW did and caved into the pressure of pleasing the fan base. What we sacrificed was getting under the radar guys who may have been better and hungrier than some of the higher rated players, and I got the impression that around 17’ it would begin to show, and that happened. I have a feeling that CTA will hopefully not cave into the “this guy is highly rated” bias.