Recruiting can sometimes be a crapshoot, especially if you’re Arizona Football, and given their string of bad luck, here are my Top 5 local recruiting blunders.
If you are a college football coach, it is hard to get every recruiting evaluation right, and if you are a coach of Arizona Football, those recruiting misevaluations are quantified greatly, especially when you consider the overall struggles of the program for about the last decade or so.
First and foremost, please excuse the rather obvious non sequitur, but Arizona Football and Arizona Basketball are not on the same level. Everything from their tradition, success, etc. they are two very different programs.
Arizona Wildcats
I know for some fans, this is a hard reality to accept, especially for fans who saw Lute Olson lift an Arizona Basketball program from former bottom dweller status in the then Pac-10.
Let’s face it, Arizona Basketball is considered one of the best programs in the country, they have won a National Championship unlike the Football team, and they are typically revered as one of best programs on the West Coast.
Furthermore, their success at the professional level has made Arizona Football’s “professional success” pale in comparison.
So given those things, why do some fans feel that Arizona Football should somehow recruit at a high level like the Basketball program does? Or why would anyone think that the football equivalent of Lute is out there for us, waiting to make the Wildcats a football power?
I don’t know, but the point is, is that you cannot, judge the programs the same, and when it comes to recruiting, you simply cannot have the same expectations for each of the programs.
However, I do think there are ways for Arizona to get better in recruiting, and to me, it starts at the local level. That’s why I created a list of recruiting misses.
*Please note, these are kids that never got offers from Arizona, hence why Bijan Robinson won’t be on this list. It’s not a miss if Arizona gave him an offer, and it was apparent that Bijan wasn’t going to come here anyways. Need help coming to grips with that point? Read the previous few paragraphs a couple more times.
With that said, here is my list of Top 5 Local Recruiting misses, starting with the Honorable Mention Selections.