TXHokie, here are the answers, the rankings are from Phil Steele’s people. Here’s how I see it, in short, and on recruiting paper, we don’t want for front-6 talent to field a nifty OLine….
Here is TXHokie‘s very fair and pretty tough question(s) from the pay MB:
345, 116, 75, 87, 34, 32, 66, 11, 70, 25, 16, 87, 55, 100, 132, 72.
1. Those are the positional rankings of most of our 2-deep & several 3-deeps, outta High School (H.S.) That’s an average of 82nd outta H.S. at their given H.S. position. Grimes never had anything close to that. Stiney (and now Newsome) have enjoyed many many more VTH blue-chips. Now consider that there are 119 D-1 teams, they all need 15 OLinemen to fill out an entire 3-deep. So it’s pretty tough to trump low 80’s as an average 3-deep ranking; unless thy name is So.Cal, Texas, FLA, or a similar top-shelf D-1 name-brand college football factory.
2. Frank just does not dig the JuCo gig. I don’t really know why this is??? He had a bad experience with a former JuCo DT transfer (different Jimmy Williams than the one you may be thinking of, outta some feeder school in Cali’ if Ginko serves). That was about 2002-2003, I don’t see any JuCo’s since. And I only saw a couple who did not really contribute much at all, (all offensive linemen by the way), before that on a few old VT recruiting rosters. Again, Frank just does not go for that possible quick fix, as he prefers a possible 4 to 5 year player as opposed to a 1 to 2 year spare tire. That’s his mantra, right or wrong.
3. Brown I would suggest was possibly hurt by this move, and he has been hurt further by
the change of sides at OT. Brown would have been a better blocking TE, than he is a blocking OT, and Brown had some pretty decent hands to catch the football with, not to mention very nice TE size. Wang we really don’t know for sure just yet (though I saw him as a very solid blocking TE, think an impoverished man’s John Burke). As we lack actual gametime footage to make an objective deduction on him at this point. But I am told that Wang was doing pretty dog-gone well in terms of blocking at OT.
3a. worth considering as well, we have 5 ex-TE’s in our 3-deep along the OLine. (including, “yes”, Nick Marshman). That would seem to suggest a desire for more nimble OLinemen, who could better deal with the very fast and likewise athletic defenses that currently haunt the upper-echelon of the ACC.
I do like where Curt Newsome is steering this offensive-line ship. You don’t rank 13th in Rushing Offense, and 8th in Pass Protection at little ole JMU via accident. The thing is that C.Newsome has a long way in front of him…”to row the boat ashore.” Give him time, C.Newsome is a pathfinder, we are on our way, but our ETA currently reads 2009 at the earliest. b-st.
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