The Future of ND Football

Dick, I think it's pretty clear from the article that if Charlie Weis had decided Luck was better, Lemming would have put Luck up there, and if Weis had decided Gabbert was better, Lemming would have put Gabbert up there.

You, being a non-fanboi, should be able to acknowledge that.

 

Tom Lemming is in the tank for Notre Dame. Everyone knows that. And, in particular, he's in the tank for coaches who feed him information.

 

How do you explain Mitch Mustain being 58 spots ahead of Jake Locker? After all, this is an exact science, ranking 18-year-olds is. Obviously, Mustain must have been a recipient of the Razorback bounce, no? What other explanation could there be for a cherry-picked example of the rankings getting it wrong?

 

Then your argument to my assertion about guys getting the Notre Dame bump is what, exactly? We've spent two pages on something that apparently we agree on.

 

Yes, I agree that Tom Lemming over ranks Notre Dame players. He is the Rasmussen of recruiting rankings - you have to account for the bias.

I missed it - is he now the only person ranking recruits?

 

Hell, I said early on that this isn't like the days when Tom Lemming was setting the recruiting rankings himself. I thought that the implication was clear that he over ranks Notre Dame recruits. It used to happen. It doesn't happen now, not with Rivals and Scout and ESPN and everyone else ranking.

 

I watched that Herchel Walker Doc last night and they showed some clips from '81 Sugar Bowl.

It was stunning how much more physical and fast ND was then compared to now.

 

Interesting that you mentioned that they used to be more physical. I agree. You want to run a country club school? Then you are going to get country club kids playing for you. Add that to the worship they get on campus and ... why is anyone surprised at how soft they are?

 

Lord. I don't think I said anywhere that the rankings are going to be exactly how college football plays out over the next five-year span. But when you have a systemic and longtime disconnect between the recruiting rankings and the actual performance on the field, and you have a situation like that where one of the leading analysts is saying he ranked a guy higher just because Charlie Weis was interested, and that program happens to be the most historically covered and favored program in the nation and is still the only one that merits its own network TV deal, it's a pretty compelling case for the OVER-RATED chant.

Also, that whole Mustain/Malzahn/Nutt situation was so F-ed up that there's no telling what went wrong there.

 

Lemming does not say he ranked Crist over Luck because Weis did. That may have been the case, but he doesn't say that. He's using Weis's analysis as a way to show that he wasn't alone back then in thinking that Crist was better.

 

Lorenzo Booker exposed Tom Lemming as fraud.

 

Didn't Myron Rolle also say that Lemming tried to convince him to go to Notre Dame for the academics instead of Florida State?

One Rhodes Scholarship later ...