Thanks to our sponsor Inteleca for helping bring back Q's Take my weekly look at things around GT and college sports from my vantage.
Monday is Earth Day and our friends at Inteleca are celebrating by offering an opportunity to recycle your old work computers and equipment. Check out the link below and the details to register to bring in your old IT assets to be recycled. The event is from 10 am to 4 pm.
https://23380427.hs-sites.com/earthday
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Following the initial purge of players leaving in the portal, I was reminded of something that is true now in college football. The days of having a three-deep at any position are over. If you are Bama, UGA, Georgia Tech or even Georgia State or Georgia Southern, most positions especially ones that have limited numbers on the field at the time are going to remain a constant work in progress. There will be some exceptions to that like Jamal Haynes who stuck it out when he was the third-team slot at the end of the spring of 2023 before they moved him to RB where he blossomed, but the days having a fourth-year breakout player that stayed within the program all four years developing are going to be limited.
Kids and coaches are not going to be overly patient for the light bulb to turn on or for depth to clear out to give someone a shot. Quite frankly the coaches can't afford to be in this era where boosters are heavily invested in the product with their own money via NIL and the push to upgrade in unrestricted free agency over anyone struggling to development is too much. On the flip side, schools that get poached for depth are going to poach other programs and that probably is going to flow downhill. I saw a D-2 kid today commit to play basketball at Longwood. Longwood lost one of their best players to the portal, Jonathan Massie who neither you or I have ever heard of, but that is how it is in college basketball now.
You can find plenty of the same in college football, but that example was what popped in my head when I was surfing Twitter early tonight after the Rivals Camp in Atlanta.
We are entering a weird phase of college sports mostly in football and basketball (both men's and women's) where this is getting to be a bigger issue.
Hoops that is not as big of a deal because you need eight good players to have a good team. In football, that number is probably 60 of the 85.
Will this last forever? No, I think things are going to evolve at a rapid pace over the next decade and this is a weird road bump in the forced evolution of college athletics thanks to the ineptitude of the NCAA, but as Paul Johnson liked to say, "it is what it is."
GT has often struggled with fielding a strong two-deep and Brent Key is working to fix that and build out depth while trying to find the right types of kids to develop over the long term. Some will leave for greener grasses and often times many are finding the portal market kind of stinks for them and many are dropping down to the G5s or FCS level when it doesn't work out. It is a lot more cutthroat than it was in 2018 or 2008 or 1998 when it comes to roster management and those types of things on the football or hoops' programs end as well, but that is the double-edged sword of unrestricted free agency. It is bad for pretty much everyone involved except for 1% of the players who can max out their earnings in college by becoming a free agent going to the highest bidder.
Recruiting will still be the bedrock of Georgia Tech athletics and last season the basketball team's top 8 featured four players who signed with GT out of HS and two others who transferred home to be in Atlanta during their college careers (Kyle and Kowacie after different points). The football team's starting 22 featured eight offensive starters who were signed by GT out of HS and defensively eight and all four specialists. That is about the ratio that Key should aim for moving ahead but it will ebb and flow over time and some of the transfers who started or will start in the future were guys who came here as quick transfers as freshmen like Makius Scott or Corey Robinson who actually started fewer games than Ethan Mackenny at LT overall or KJ Wallace at nickel.
This is a different era of sports for both hoops and football. Stoudamire is moving toward the NBA talent acquisition model that Paul Hewitt used well at times and Bobby Cremins in hoops but that will also see a lot of movement roster-wise year to year only there is a portal which Hewitt and Cremins never had access to that will allow saving yourself from a mistake or miss in recruiting.
Key wants as much of his talent to be homegrown and developed and in that 70% kids you signed are your core guys. Culture is a big thing when you start adding pieces as well and that is something that Stoudamire and Key have both harped on when constructing their respective rosters.
At the end of the day, you are going to see guys like Amaree Abram come and go or Tafara Gapare or James BlackStrain or Steven Jones Jr. or Ayo Tifase (the Ebenezer Dowuona of GT football for 2024 so far). It is the nature of the game at the moment. Good depth is like finding gold and is just as hard to keep.
Monday is Earth Day and our friends at Inteleca are celebrating by offering an opportunity to recycle your old work computers and equipment. Check out the link below and the details to register to bring in your old IT assets to be recycled. The event is from 10 am to 4 pm.
https://23380427.hs-sites.com/earthday
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Following the initial purge of players leaving in the portal, I was reminded of something that is true now in college football. The days of having a three-deep at any position are over. If you are Bama, UGA, Georgia Tech or even Georgia State or Georgia Southern, most positions especially ones that have limited numbers on the field at the time are going to remain a constant work in progress. There will be some exceptions to that like Jamal Haynes who stuck it out when he was the third-team slot at the end of the spring of 2023 before they moved him to RB where he blossomed, but the days having a fourth-year breakout player that stayed within the program all four years developing are going to be limited.
Kids and coaches are not going to be overly patient for the light bulb to turn on or for depth to clear out to give someone a shot. Quite frankly the coaches can't afford to be in this era where boosters are heavily invested in the product with their own money via NIL and the push to upgrade in unrestricted free agency over anyone struggling to development is too much. On the flip side, schools that get poached for depth are going to poach other programs and that probably is going to flow downhill. I saw a D-2 kid today commit to play basketball at Longwood. Longwood lost one of their best players to the portal, Jonathan Massie who neither you or I have ever heard of, but that is how it is in college basketball now.
You can find plenty of the same in college football, but that example was what popped in my head when I was surfing Twitter early tonight after the Rivals Camp in Atlanta.
We are entering a weird phase of college sports mostly in football and basketball (both men's and women's) where this is getting to be a bigger issue.
Hoops that is not as big of a deal because you need eight good players to have a good team. In football, that number is probably 60 of the 85.
Will this last forever? No, I think things are going to evolve at a rapid pace over the next decade and this is a weird road bump in the forced evolution of college athletics thanks to the ineptitude of the NCAA, but as Paul Johnson liked to say, "it is what it is."
GT has often struggled with fielding a strong two-deep and Brent Key is working to fix that and build out depth while trying to find the right types of kids to develop over the long term. Some will leave for greener grasses and often times many are finding the portal market kind of stinks for them and many are dropping down to the G5s or FCS level when it doesn't work out. It is a lot more cutthroat than it was in 2018 or 2008 or 1998 when it comes to roster management and those types of things on the football or hoops' programs end as well, but that is the double-edged sword of unrestricted free agency. It is bad for pretty much everyone involved except for 1% of the players who can max out their earnings in college by becoming a free agent going to the highest bidder.
Recruiting will still be the bedrock of Georgia Tech athletics and last season the basketball team's top 8 featured four players who signed with GT out of HS and two others who transferred home to be in Atlanta during their college careers (Kyle and Kowacie after different points). The football team's starting 22 featured eight offensive starters who were signed by GT out of HS and defensively eight and all four specialists. That is about the ratio that Key should aim for moving ahead but it will ebb and flow over time and some of the transfers who started or will start in the future were guys who came here as quick transfers as freshmen like Makius Scott or Corey Robinson who actually started fewer games than Ethan Mackenny at LT overall or KJ Wallace at nickel.
This is a different era of sports for both hoops and football. Stoudamire is moving toward the NBA talent acquisition model that Paul Hewitt used well at times and Bobby Cremins in hoops but that will also see a lot of movement roster-wise year to year only there is a portal which Hewitt and Cremins never had access to that will allow saving yourself from a mistake or miss in recruiting.
Key wants as much of his talent to be homegrown and developed and in that 70% kids you signed are your core guys. Culture is a big thing when you start adding pieces as well and that is something that Stoudamire and Key have both harped on when constructing their respective rosters.
At the end of the day, you are going to see guys like Amaree Abram come and go or Tafara Gapare or James BlackStrain or Steven Jones Jr. or Ayo Tifase (the Ebenezer Dowuona of GT football for 2024 so far). It is the nature of the game at the moment. Good depth is like finding gold and is just as hard to keep.
