The Blue Board

What are some of you guy’s hearing about Sims’s, Bell, and Gholston?

Sims’s and Gholston should probably come back. Bell would be making a mistake IMO if he came back.

I keep seeing the TJ Duckett comparison’s for him but I think he could be a poor man’s Stephen Jackson in the right situation. He has a nice all-around game.

All have children. A will be going to the NFL I believe. I agree with your assessment of sims and Gholston but they need to take care of family first. They can finish their degree later. As far as Bell goes, if he comes back I'll try to kick his ass for being that dumb. He'd get 40 carries a game and he'd be abused. ( I don't think Bell has a child )

Wiltfong article on the 2014 kids that look to be among the best. Tons of ND and tOSU love.

http://247sports.com/Article/The-Midwests-Top-Juniors-Expected-to-Be-Nationally-Recruited-107323

Not shocking, considering those 2 schools just went a combined 24-0 in the regular season.

I see what you did there . . . but it's what I've been saying for awhile. It takes at least a decade of constant winning to boost your recruiting profile, even moreso if you're in a talent-poor state. Look at Wisky; they're just starting to push for top 25 classes (if this one doesn't fall apart it's rated #25) and they've pulled 4-stars from CA and NJ. It's taken them 20+ years to do so.

MSU is in a little better position in terms of raw in-state talent, though competing with UM for that talent is always going to be an issue. Still, MSU is closer to OH and IN than Wisky (why Wisky can't snag a couple IL 4-stars/year is beyond me . . . then again, IL talent in general seems to scatter to the four winds; Pocic to LSU, Isaac to USC, Treadwell to East Jesus West Kentucky), so I estimated 10ish years of consistent winning to start to raise MSU's recruiting profile. We'll see if that happens (both the winning and the recruiting windfall).

Yea, my theory is that it takes 2 generations for a program's allure to fade. The people growing up during the glory years will pass that love on to their kids, even if those kids grow up in an era when that team sucks (last 20 years for ND). If the program continues to slide, however, the grandkids of the original "glory year" people are unlikely to share the love of the program.

It also works out that that 40-50 year time gap is about the time since MSU last won an NC/was consistently good. I actually think if they hadn't imploded with Perles that the program would be at or above Wisconsin's current level in the conference, but that Probabtion + Saban-Williams-JLS era really sucked the last bit of life out of the program. Figure in '90 MSU had won 2 of the last 4 Big 10 titles and could have really built something up, but Papa Perles got greedy, etc. etc. blah blah blah .

Bottom line: MSU pretty much has had to rebuild from scratch; most of the people who remember the glory days have grandkids who are D-1 prospect age and that's just not going to cut it as a "national power".

I'd rather have a player get a suspended license than beat up a hockey player.

I hate that Brandon is messing with the helmet. Messing with the jersey was bad enough.

You can also look at the Florida school cycles and UCLA starting to be a regular competitor against USC, though those states have enough in-state talent to spread around.

OK State/Oklahoma might be an interesting dynamic to watch, though OK State has a billionaire booster to help things out . Oregon is a meh recruiting state, but they're right next to CA.

I kind of put MSU as the "fall back school for 4-stars"; able to beat out PSU and Nebraska for recruits from time to time, but is generally going to lose the battles to ND, UM, tOSU, Bama, etc. except for kids who grew up Spartan fans (4-stars like Hicks and Jones don't have tOSU offers, for instance, nor did a guy like Burkland back in '10). MSU's recruiting classes seem to be mostly high 3-star guys, some 4-star In-state MSU fans and usually 1-2 out of state 4-stars.

One thing that's interesting is that MSU has made some major inroads into PA. They pulled 4-star Clemons out of there in '11, 4-star Cox in '12, 4-star Terry this year. Tyler Boyd set an official to MSU for Jan. 18th as well. I thought this staff would hit IL harder, but it looks like PA is becoming the #3 state outside of OH and MI. GA and IN are next in line.

In terms of quality, I don't think MSU is recruiting poorly. I don't believe they're recruiting at a nationally competitive level either. In the conference, I'd say only Ohio State and UM are amassing demonstrably more raw talent; Nebraska is probably ahead of MSU by a little bit, though not as much as the rankings alone would indicate (they have quite a few 4-star JUCOs that don't stick around more than 2 years, making their older recruiting classes a poor indication of how much talent is on that team).

That said, it's not that MSU has demonstrably MORE talent than a lot of conference teams; on par with Wisky, probably slightly ahead of Iowa and Northwestern, making only IL/IN/Purdue and Minny truly "less talented" than MSU. That leads to more toss-up games, and while MSU can beat just about anyone in the conference, it remains true that most of the conference is equally capable of beating MSU.

That makes it harder to sustain success; we saw how thin the margin was for MSU this year, and they fell on the wrong side of a lot of close games. You see similar situations at Iowa and Wisconsin, and I suspect with PSU and Nebraska moving forward.

BTW, get ready for some MSU attrition. Predictions have been revised from a 15 man class to up to 20. There are only 12 scholarship SRs leaving by our count, plus Bell (likely).

MSU would have 76 players on scholarship not counting any 2013 commits and removing the 12 SRs. Bell is probably gone, so that brings it down to 75. 10 people will leave the program/get injured by next year? that's alot.

Are Ray and Freeman still on scholarship? I didnt think they were

Fonoti and Hoover are coming back, so i count only 9 (Caper, McDonald, Ruhland, White, Norman, Gardiner, Adams, M White, Conroy)