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When you have to gut the class of most of the players I mentioned and basically start over, it's probably tough to find enough bona fide players. Regardless, whether bona fide or not, we had a numbers problem thanks to Orgeron and we had to have bodies. I mean, we kept 6 of Orgeron's guys. So, it's December (two months before signing day) when the new coach gets the job and he basically needs 20-22 more players

...if you went to one of the pay sites, you'd think we had a stellar class lined up. Even as the non-qualifiers were being dropped, people were screaming bloody murder wanting to know why we were wrecking the class. This class, if Orgeron had stayed, would have been worse than his 2005 class where damn near everyone left or was kicked off the team. It would have possibly been a program-killing class. We're bad, but we can climb out of the hole. If we sign a second disastrous class in 4 years, I don't know how long it takes to recover.

...several times as it pertains to college football. Do you have to have the players first to win or do you have to win to get the players? Top players aren't going in droves to losing programs no matter who the recruiter is. Not on a long term basis at least. The answer is that you hire a good coach and you win. Then, after you've had some success, you start concerning yourself with how high a caliber player you're landing. You always recruit the best you can get, but I'd never again hire a great recruiter who isn't a proven, outstanding coach as well.

I look at that list of our 12 core players in that class under Orgeron and I can name 8 for you that don't get in under any program he puts them on in my opinion. They are:

Kenny Ashley
Daniel Calvin
Daniel Thomas
Willie Packer
Darius Barksdale
Gavin Hardin
Kenneth Davis
Josh Tillman

That's 8 of the 12 that I think Orgeron would have had to cut or sign backups for immediately. And I have severe doubts about the other 4 as well. Again, these aren't guys we're taking a chance on and, if they don't pan out, no big deal. The class was built around these guys. These were the so-called studs of the group. Sign and place takes on a whole new meaning when you're looking at potentially having to do it with half the class. Furthermore, after we lost our first 5 or 6 SEC games, we really ceased to be on the radar of any of the other top kids. We had no recruiting momentum whatsoever. So who are you signing as the backup to these guys? Orgeron wasn't in on Devin Thomas or Enrique Davis or any of those type kids. Our main targets to fill out the rest of the class were fellow grade risks Alonzo Lawrence, DeAndre Brown, and Bo Tillman. Joel Ross was thrown around. He's unlikely to get in school, as well.

Now, if he gets 4 or 5 of those 12 in, I think he's really pulled a rabbit out of his hat. But again, as you said, what does it matter if they're back out after the first year because they couldn't make the grades? Getting them signed and in school is only a small part of the battle. For the player to be worth the effort and productive for us, they really need to play 3 or 4 years. We're not going to win many games (which is the only reason you have a program) if we're lining up our newest crop of freshman and sophomores every year. The goal is to eventually have talented junior and senior-laden teams - like the rest of the country.

With our depth being totally destroyed by the 2005 class, the non-qualifiers and future academically-ineligible players from this class would have been nothing short of disastrous. We've been woefully short on numbers since that 2005 class. Having a repeat of that is just unimagineable. I can't imagine what would have happened if we had allowed this rube to continue on and finish out this class.

1. If you believe he would have gotten them in, that's fine. Daniel Thomas and Daniel Calvin both said that they wouldn't meet SEC juco requirements because of the extra math. Thomas said he could have done it, but didn't want to. Josh Tillman was said to be enrolling in GCCC last I checked. Tig wasn't even fucking close and turned out to be an even bigger headcase than any of us had previously known. Ken Davis was so bad that he had to drop out of high school. Kenny Ashley isn't getting out of JUCO. Period. Not to any school. Gavin Hardin was looking to pull his GPA up 0.5 points and his ACT up 2 points with a semester and a half left in his high school career. Not sure what you know about gpa's, but...not happening. ACT maybe. GPA highly unlikely. None of that is assumption.

2. I'm not assuming O would have kept these players. I'm saying that he could have cut them. But how do you cut half of your own self-compiled class 2 and a half months before signing day? Was he going to oversign by 12 players? Furthermore, remember the 2007 class? We had enough room to sign 27 or so players. We signed 22. Why? Because we started cutting players or had a few drop their commitment and, when pressed about replacements, O remarked that he wouldn't sign players he didn't want just for numbers' sake. We were hurting for bodies - short on numbers for the last 3 years. But he wasn't just going to sign somebody that he didn't want. Name the big time, solid players that were lined up and wanting to come to Ole Miss late last season when 0-8 was looming over our head. There weren't any. We were hoping and praying for Lawrence, Brown, Tillman. All big grade risks. We were even looking at Terrance Pope and Joel Ross. Both, again, big grade risks.

3. This is where you really miss the boat. Orgeron did a decent job recruiting in the first 3 years. I know about Cutcliffe and what he left. I'm not disputing that. HOWEVER, Orgeron's recruiting momentum was gone by the end of last year. Gone. We hadn't won a conference game and comments by recruits sounded worse every week. You want to hold Orgeron up as a great recruiter and a poor coach. The fact is that his poor coaching was destroying his recruiting. Nutt did finish the year recruiting better to our school than Orgeron did and the reason is that Nutt didn't have 0-8 hanging around his neck. He was selling kids on changing the losing culture at Ole Miss after leaving a fairly successful job to come to Ole Miss. He had just beaten the number one team in the country at their place. Orgeron meanwhile was pleading with kids to come and help him when the reality that these kids saw on television was that this guy had no business being on the field as a head man. Talk with slick words and power point all you want, but they saw the futility with their own eyes. We had no recruiting momentum. He was not recruiting well at the end. And the reason is because that's what happens when you can't win games on the field. Nutt had a much better platform than Orgeron did in December at Ole Miss.

Orgeron did get good talent on this team - until his losing really began to take a toll. 2006 was a very good class. 2007 was a clear step down. 2008 was looking disastrous. Is that because Orgeron was a bad recruiter? No. It's because even he, as a good recruiter, couldn't overcome the fact that he was a poor coach who didn't have what it takes to win on the field. You saw it. I saw it. And recruits saw it. If you can name any of the players that were even looking at us strongly last year before he left, I'll listen. But we were chock-full of potential non-qualifiers and the only people I remember being left on the board were potential non-qualifiers.