3 Final Thoughts Leading Up To National Signing Day For The Bearcats

Tomorrow marks the day that I have dubbed one of what I consider five Christmases, National Signing Day. The others are Opening Day, real Christmas, college football bowl season, and March Madness. This year’s NSD for the Cincinnati Bearcats probably won’t have as many surprises as in the past. The fact is, UC is sitting right around 15 verbal commitments and Tommy Tuberville probably won’t add many more players to that list. I could see the final count come in around 20 but given the youth already on the roster and how many players UC returns next season, the class of 2013 won’t be nearly as large as previous classes. A couple of uncommitted prospects to keep an eye on who will choose between Cincinnati and another school include Travis Johnson, Rodney Adams, and Darius Tice, among likely others. However overall this will likely be a fairly uneventful signing day for UC.

Still a great day though and here are a few thoughts heading into tomorrow.

Trust The Recruiting Services, To An Extent

247 Sports, Rivals, ESPN, and Scout all do a solid job in extensively and intensively covering the hundreds of recruits who graduate from high school every year. By and large their rankings are pretty spot on. But there are just so many recruits for even the four of them to cover that many slip through the cracks. That’s when players like Connor Barwin and Michael Crabtree rise from low rated high school prospects to college stars and eventual high NFL Draft picks. But generally the more highly rated prospects a program signs, the stronger those football programs become. Matt Hinton explains what I’m talking about here.

So the ratings and stars these recruiting sites give are generally a good indication of how player will develop in college. But I would value the number of scholarship offers or amount of interest from BCS programs slightly more than how many stars a prospect receives. After all, coaches know best. Generally highly rated prospects also bring along a laundry list of offers from the country’s best programs. But it’s the middle-tier recruits where the correlation starts to fall apart. For example, Tion Green was pretty much a consensus three-star recruit but he boasted several scholarship offers from BCS programs; Arizona, Louisville, NC State, South Florida, and West Virginia to name a few. Now the Cincinnati sophomore will arguably have the inside track to the starting runningback job next season. So trust the ratings the recruiting services provide but remember they aren’t the be-all end-all evaluator of how prospects will progress when they sign with their schools or how those programs as a whole will perform.

Final Spots Must Fill Needs In The Trenches

The main theme you’ll notice if you glance up and down the list of UC verbals is that they are heavy on athletes and playmakers but light on linemen. I’ve always seen the need for the Bearcats to add some players who can fight in the trenches but neither Jones nor Tuberville seem to have addressed that for the 2013 class. Ben Flick should be a good one but the Bearcats have lost Eason Fromayan, Caleb Stacey, and Dylan Wiesman in the past year and their replacements have not been found.

The thing about recruiting linemen, and on the offensive side especially, is that coaches have to recruit them to fill needs 2 years out because they are usually redshirted as freshmen and only begin to get looks during their second year on campus. So even though in 2013 Cincinnati returns everyone along the offensive line, in 2014 they will have to replace 3 of their 5 starters. The Bearcats can prepare for that turnover by recruiting more blockers now. On the other side of the line of scrimmage, UC needs to sign at least one more recruit who can play on the interior of the defensive line. The need here isn’t as crucial as on the offensive front but with the final few spots the defensive tackle position must be addressed.

This Will Be A Depth-Filling Class, Not An Impact Class

Tommy Tuberville has hired a slew of good recruiters to upgrade the talent even further at Cincinnati. But in compiling the 2013 class they were hamstrung by time, having just a month and a half to put it together. This is why we see so many fairly unknown recruits committed to UC and quite a few JUCO’s taking up spots as well. In a transition year with so little time to really put their personal touch on a class, Tuberville and his staff are simply doing the best they can.

I wouldn’t be worried, though. Coaches know best, remember? Some of Cincinnati’s coaches have been recruiting high school players for longer than I’ve been alive. They know what they’re doing and most of the commitments in the 2013 class will likely be eased into the system rather than through into the fire because of all of the talented youth already on Cincinnati’s roster. The players in this class will be adding valuable depth to positions where they will be short on it beginning next season. And at the end of the day that is the main purpose of recruiting at the collegiate level.