Recruiting in baseball is the hardest of all the major sports as size and strength or jumping ability etc. do not always compute to being able to hit a baseball at the next level and that is the reason the major leagues draft hundreds of players every year in addition to signing half the players of age in the Carribean. Bad draft picks and signings outweigh the good ones by a 10-1 margin at least.
Excuses, excuses, excuses....that's all I'm hearing. It's NOT hard to determine whether a kid will be a top draft pick in the MLB draft. If Turtle is suppose to be this guru judge of talent then he has the smarts enought to know this. If not, all you have to do is talk to a scout or two, or a national cross checker and they'll tell you. And I'm not saying you don't recruit some of these kids, but you as the recruiter know whether a particular recruit is going to sign a pro contract or not. There was a time when LSU had more draft picks coming out of LSU after their college careers than before coming to LSU. Development of players is a MUST at the collegiate level. Maybe someone has the time to go back and look at LSU's national championship teams and see how many of those players were Top 3 round draft picks coming out of high school. That way we'd have proof of who's right. I welcome anyone to show me that I'm wrong on this, I'll gladly capitulate if proven wrong. Skip and his assistants did a good job of recruiting kids with talent and then developing that talent. I just think that Smoke, Turtle and whomever else need to reevaluate some of their recruiting techniques. Because reading Turtle's quotes, it sure doesn't seem like there was or has been much of a contingency plan once they've lost top kids to the draft.
That's because the good players have to have somebody to play against at the minor league level in order to develop. It basically amounts to culling diamonds from a pile of rocks.
That recruit, Oaga (sp?)--a SS from Oregon--got drafted in the 50th round, said he wasn't signing a pro contract unless he was a first-rounder. He has great potential for us.