Gregory Genross
- Thread starter Rupert Jenkins
- Start date
When I saw the name, two things came to mind…
Our staff had better…
Always Be Closing.
#CoffeeisforClosers
Our staff had better…
Always Be Closing.
#CoffeeisforClosers
I need somebody to over-analyze his Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Threads posts or this isn't a legit recruiting post.
Same, I read it three times thinking someone named their kid after the play/movie
JUCO Football is not what it used to be 20-30 years ago. The age of Internet, Social Media, Scouting, etc has made JUCO Football basically glorified High School. There are very, very few hidden gems in JUCO Football.
Exactly.
MSU needs to get away from JUCOs and we can’t because they’re culturally significant here.
Needless to say, there are a lot of culturally significant things in Mississippi we need to discard.
Like Ole Miss. **
#SaveTheValley
Disagree with you and @Maroon Eagle. We have signed a number of good players recently out of JUCO. You can’t ignore this.
JUCOs are one of the few things MS did right in the world of sports, right behind being charter members of the SEC.
Stats: Plays for the Dodge City (Kansas) Conquistadors. Originally from New York City. Through six games this season he has 11 receptions for 158 yds, 2 TDs and a long catch of 33 yds. Stands 6'6'" and 230 lbs. Caught 10 passes for 92 yards as a freshman last year in 8 games. Not related to Miss Kitty or Marshall Dillon.
It’s one of the best things we started.
JUCOs are evolving though.
What Mississippi has done with JUCOs are seen as an outlier within the national JUCO community itself.
I’ve said before many times here that I’m all for JUCO athletics programs and scholarships because it’s a way in which they can help Mississippians looking for opportunities by offering ways to attend school less expensively.
But the JUCOs are being squeezed out because football is not cost effective for many of them— and I’m not even touching how the portal bypasses them as options for many college football players.
Our 4 JC signees from last year are Leon Bell, Eric Taylor, Jeffrey Pittman and Jacoby Bellazar. None of those are making a significant impact at MSU.
They might eventually. Seems like everyone wants to compare all JUCOs to Jackie's 1999 class, and that's not fair. That class struck oil. In 2001 we busted.
Most of them take a half year or so to acclimate, or we could redshirt them and get 2 good years. Last year's JUCO class was Lewis and Nicholson, both of whom play. Year before that Page and Jones. Before that Heath, Davis, Ducking and Wheat. All those guys played.
This is true but the guys that go there are still there, in existence. And they are right down the right from us. And there may even be more overlooked high school Mississippians headed there now, with the portal. And they develop them for free.
A couple of them may eventually drop football, but there's like 15 of them isn't it?
Portal is just an easy way out. JUCO is what it always was, and most times it doesn't take NIL.
And that’s the problem right there.
MSU is in the situation where we’ve gotten away from being a program that relied on scouting and redshirting players — a decision made during Leach’s early tenure (something I disagreed with at the time) but it turned out to be a prescient move because the portal has meant teams have moved to a build quickly mode.
State can’t afford eventual players now— and even more so from JUCOs with folks that have less eligibility.
You’ve seen on this board that people don’t want to wait.
State needs to make smart portal decisions and also emphasize high school recruiting. JUCOs are a garnish— not the entree.
It's not just that there are fewer hidden gems, the transfer rules have made it unnecessary to go JUCO to avoid a RS when your first choice doesn't work out. So you don't have those players that spend a year in big time football and go to Juco so they can play for a year and then change schools. I think several of our better Juco players recently followed this path? Montez sweat comes to mind.
I still think we can afford to develop, they just need to be the right guys. And one thing is for certain, we can't do what other teams are doing. That won't work.
And of course JUCOs aren't the entree. They never have been except for a 4-year period from 1999-2002, which was way up and way down. But since that time, they've been an integral part of what we do.
I agree those guys like Sweat and Abrams will be rare. But those guys don't come around too often anyway. Those aren't the guys I'm talking about.
I'm talking more Chris White, Vick Ballard, Darius Slay, Denico Autry, Justin Cox. Guys who blow up at JUCO.
And those were nearly a decade ago. Fast forward to today and you have a perfect example. Percy Lewis was a "consensus" 4 star, #2 ranked JUCO player, and he's going to leave MSU having never been a full time starter on our "terrible" offensive line.
He's played in every game on the two deep, and I believe he can come back next year (and we will need him). But even if he can't, he's far from a waste. If we hadn't had all those COVID seniors back, he'd have been a starter this season.
I'm not really seeing the difference here. You don't think Pittman, Bellazar and Taylor will help us? Nicholson is a starter. Pittman and Taylor see the field regularly. Bellazar has 4-5 talented WRs ahead of him.
I think you're still going to be able to get role players from JUCO. Just going to be much rarer to get a star. And it will be more likely to be actual late bloomers rather than people that got overlooked.
The flipside of that is that as schools rely more and more on the transfer portal rather than high school signees, the G5 schools can't sign all of those high school players, so maybe you see some better talent at JUCO? Could end up near the same place after it all shakes out.
I don't think MSU will have stars, period, anymore. I think that's a reality we're all going to have to get used to. So we better pick and choose wisely where we spend our NIL, to retain those stars.
This is all, again, why I advocate for a scheme/plan that goes against the grain in every way.
I didn't say he was a waste. I'm just saying that we are going to be desperate for STARTERS next year. And our track record of JUCOs in the last several years has not produced many guys that can start right away.
It's ok to build depth, but in situations like ours, especially next year when we lose so many seniors if you are looking to JUCO you can't miss. We are going to need starters at virtually every position: WR, OL, possibly QB, DL, LB, and DB.
You mentioned Lewis and Nicholson. Lewis was depth last year and Nicholson gave us nothing. You can't have that when we are trying to replace a whole bunch of starters. A developmental JUCO that is going to sit on the bench for an entire season would put us even further behind.
What we have to do next year is a separate discussion.
I'm more talking on a general basis, year-in year-out. And further, the JUCOs we signed this year should be contributing next year, when those starters are needed.
Is it not concerning to any of you that we are celebrating offers to players that are not even ranked?
We are now competing against Tex St, Chattanooga, New Mexico state, and the Troy's of the football world.
We are now competing against Tex St, Chattanooga, New Mexico state, and the Troy's of the football world.
Eh. Did we offer?
Looks like our interest in him is cool with the main advantage of him being an upperclassman with some experience.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he went to Troy or New Mexico State.
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