I would get back to my original premise, and that is, Cut did not recruit as effectively as he might have when beginning at Duke.
Look at Cut's first year, his first full year, where he had already had an opertunity to recruit half a class in the prior year,
http://rivals.yahoo.com/duke/footbal...ts/2009/duke-2
Compare the academic profiles and rivals ratings with James Franklin's first year at Vanderbilt
http://rivals.yahoo.com/duke/footbal.../vanderbilt-72
What you will find is that Franklin recruited better talent with better appearing academic profiles on average.
In 2009, according to the rivals database , Cut offered just 11 rivals 4 star rated recruits. We did not offer a number of higher-rated prospects whose academic profiles appeared to be quite strong, and who received offers from the academic schools: Stanford, Northwestern, Vandy, Rice. Cut did not quite get the academic, interest in Duke correlation. We also had no business offering football players who were not projected to be NCAA eligible at the time, and certainly no business taking verbal commitments from them.
In terms of GPAs and graduation rates, if you added back players dismissed from the Football Program and pulled out walkons it would look a bit different. Recent graduation rates reflect Roof's recruiting, which was at a higher academic level among scholarship players. I also would assert we learn not much in terms of what is possible in recrutiing scholarship players in making observations of a B average for the Football Team. 20% of the team are 20 plus invited walkons with math verbal SATs pushing 1400, which is great btw, and which Cuts predecessors did not have.
I think the point is to look back and learn from what was done and to understand what might be possible in the future. Because, if Cut gets on the hot seat, and we then have to make a change, we should be better prepared for the next hiring decision and have a better understanding of what is possible. Our goal is to have the most competitive Football Program as possible. The question is, what is possible in recruiting scholarship players. I think you can look to Stanford and Vandy for the answers there.