I doubt we will be competing with those teams for players until we start winning again. If we go head to head with those guys, we will lose most of the recruiting battles right now, but you have to keep fighting.
Yes, but recruiting and winning are of course two sides of the same coin. You either have to (a) leverage great recruiting as an underdog into equal footing in talent and then wins, or (b) leverage great wins as an underdog into equal footing and then high level recruiting. Ideally, you do both of these things at once. Bruce Pearl did this . . . to be fair, his first class consisted only of Ryan Childress, but he locked up all of a great class except Ramar Smith well before he took his first team to the tourney.
We are in a position right now such that (b) is the only option. If we can fill out the rest of the 25 with fairly competitive talent and not lose too much more ground, we can just hope that Butch does more with less in 2013 and that leads to a strong 2014 class. You just can't expect the same level of success out of guys recruited by the Indianas and Kentuckys and Toledos. They may win a game they aren't supposed to but they won't win SEC titles in football.
