Florida is not playing dirty. It's all about who their coach is. To high school recruits, Urban Meyer is a high-profile coach, and young. For some reason, most recuits look at Meyer as a young coach with success, but still look at Shula as a young coach trying to prove himself. Florida has a history of being an explosive team who can score points quickly in all three phases of the game: offense, defense, and special teams. That aspect is appealing to many highly touted recruits. Alabama, on the other hand, showed that it does not have that quick strike capability, even though we were #1 in the NCAA for scoring defense. Go figure.
You can look at our offensive situation and look at it two ways. Either a recruit looks at our troubles on offense and thinks, "Hell, those guys need my help," or they could think, "Hell, those guys suck, they won't be a powerhouse for a while." It seems that some guys think the latter, and most people don't think that Bama is back. It takes consistency, and one year is not consistent. Until we can consistently rake in 10 win seasons, we're not going to get the high-profile players.
To be honest, I was not very impressed by today's All-star game. Most of those guys looked lost, and made a lot of stupid decisions. Jevan Snead looked the best today, with Tebow following. Mustain looked terrible. You never know what exactly a five-star means. Ryans, Roach, Darby, McClain, Garth/Simpson, and several others were all 2 or three star recruits, and they are all now very solid players. I don't think we need to have 5 five-star recuits every season to make a statement; I'm perfectly happy with our recruiting season thus far. You have to remember that we have four or five high four-star recuits coming in, and often those guys end up being the heart of your team. True, Texas's class of Vince Young had 6 or 7 five-star guys, and that definitely helps to have those superstars, but they also had about 15 four-stars as well.
Florida may be getting some big talent coming in, but that doesn't mean very much. You can only worry about Alabama taking care of business throughout the season, and if we can get even one more great season like this one, we will start to steal some of those big time recruits who would have otherwise gone to Florida. According to Rivals, our AVG star rating is 3.56. Texas's AVG star rating in 2002 (V. Young): 3.89. Texas 2004: 3.56. Not too bad to equal a recruiting class that Texas pulled in.
