Next year’s schedule has a bunch of A list names, which might help with attendance and recruiting. This season, ND lost to Marshall, Carolina lost to Ga Tech, FSU lost to Wake, Lafayette lost to Georgetown. Lots of parity in college football. I’m happy to postpone my worries for a while.
Elko seems to emphasize basics a lot more than Cutcliffe did—maybe because he’d been a career assistant until getting the Duke job. And I REALLY liked how Elko has emphasized that until his last 2 jobs, he’d worked with guys who were more lightly recruited than the players on the other teams in their conferences. This led him to learn how to squeeze the best out of his guys. Which also works at higher levels, like at Texas A&M. As we’ve discussed at length, Cut’s teams started losing when he lost his top notch assistants, who were presumably the guys who’d be teaching the nuts and bolts.
It remains to be seen whether Elko has an ability to identify and recruit 3 star hs players who end up playing at an all conference level. This year’s high recruiting ranking is the result of his recruiting a large number of 3 star guys—they aren’t ranked individually any higher than the guys on Cut’s teams over the past decade. He recruited a whole bunch of NFL players to the A&M defense; that’s a different level of recruiting, but I’d bet he has an excellent eye for talent.
Judging from his terrific use of the transfer portal, his motivational skills which will likely lead to a lot of enthusiastic workouts between January and August, and his ability to get great performances out of guys who’d not previously been heralded as obvious starters, I’m quite optimistic.