One thing about schools at a level lower than P5: There's really no elite talent at that level. Everyone's playing with players remaining after the top tier programs take their recruits. That's still a huge "talent" pool, but not elite. So it's possible to outwork your competition and get tangible results because broadly speaking everyone has about the same caliber recruits. At Wake, we've got to go up against elite talent, and no matter how hard we work we aren't going to push anyone around. At best we can hold our own and execute a good offensive scheme. If we can attain some modicum of parity with the majority of programs in our league -- which we have in the past -- then we can compete with some of them on the basis of our coaching.
Okay, maybe that's stating the obvious, but I guess my point is that guy's like Clawson can't necessarily just do what they did at Richmond and BGSU and be successful here. They got to be able to field players that can take on another [higher] level of talent than they're used to, and which we don't historically get enough of. Clawson and staff have had good results recruiting given where we were. At the bottom. I'm interested to see how well this talent begins to perform because more and more it's going to be about what Clawson has done at Wake that will matter, and he's going to need some stats and results to entice better players to come here. It took Cutcliffe quite a while to gain momentum at Duke. A lot of incremental progress, but now he appears to be cruising and still elevating his talent. I hope we see good results sooner, but am prepared for a slow climb regardless.
