(04-14-2015 12:03 PM)HerdZoned Wrote: 2: A 1-1 with a transitional, delusional GA Southern, Statesboro is in the middle of no mans land and a lil over an hour away from any civilization in Savannah. Just because you rolled over a crappy SB Conference doesn't means you have arrived. Sooner or later you will understand why only a handful of teams run the option in IA.
Let me guess...because people will "figure it out", right? Is that why teams with better athletes on defense struggle to stop Navy and why Georgia Tech was able to make a resurgence this past season even though people were saying their offense was "figured out"?
I'm not even really sure we are a true "option team" now. We're a team that runs a lot that uses a lot of inside zone and we don't really do the same type of stuff that coaches in the Paul Johnson coaching tree do.
(04-14-2015 12:03 PM)HerdZoned Wrote: Also Ive heard that GA Southern will be so great because all of the GA kids will flock to GA Southern. Well GA Southern had 13 kids from GA in their last recruiting class. Marshall had 5, and in those 5 Marshall had 3 higher rated kids than GA Southerns highest rated GA Kid.
Bad conference or not (people like to point at La-Tech and USM's wins over the SBC but ignore the wins against the MWC and our 7th place team beating a bad ACC team), we finished 51 in the RPI while being shorthanded with scholarships and having players that had no recruiting stars from recruiting websites. You can't watch Kevin Ellison and Matt Breida (guys with zero stars) play and tell me they aren't first-rate G5 players. It's not luck that we got those guys as an FCS team. That's an example of how well we can recruit in our state.
Does this mean success is guaranteed? No, it doesn't. A bad coaching hire or an indifferent administration assuming power can set things back. But I think we have a high ceiling and won't apologize for saying that.
The biggest myth I always hear from people on this board is that success at the FCS means nothing for going to the FBS. This is always said by people who don't know much about the FCS and think WKU's national championship 5 years before they moved up is comparable to the sustained success of former FCS teams like Georgia Southern, App State, and Marshall. What you do in FCS is a reflection of what you are as a program.
I'm not drawing any conclusions on why we haven't gotten more home-and-homes and I think the premise of this thread is silly, but you can't tell me (at least for now) that Georgia Southern isn't on a trajectory similar to what Marshall was in the late 90s. On that note, I suspect GS fans here may know more about Marshall's IAA career and their early MAC days than some of the Marshall fans here.