(07-19-2014 05:29 PM)Cant make this sh t up Wrote: (07-19-2014 08:05 AM)MajorHoople Wrote: A decade ago Central's program was in much worse shape than ours. They hired a proven winner as head coach (Kelly), increased their win total in first year, had winning season the next, won MAC and a bowl his third.
Eastern seems to be following that paradigm.
We didn't.
That was the decade that Cubit was at WMU, and not recruiting West Michigan or Michigan for that matter. Sunny Florida is all he had on his mind.
True to a certain extent.
Cubit got some solid players out of MI. Phil Swanson, the O'Neills, Tre Bishop, Potter, Jamarko Simmons, Greg Marshall, Mitch Zajack and a few others.
I think he got a lot of the MI kids he wanted, but I believe he felt he could get better talent in Illinois, Ohio, and FL, and he may have been right. Hiller and White were from Ohio, and it's a long list of solid producers out of Florida.
Cubit had an edge in FL that few MAC coaches had. They had to fly there, get a hotel, rent a car, etc. While that's in most MAC recruiting budgets these days, they can't do it for extended periods of time.
Cubit had a house there and family there. He could stay there longer than most coaches, and he had the time to build relationships with coaches and players that other MAC coaches couldn't. Some will say, he should have been doing the same thing in MI, but at the time it was probably the right move, because fewer midmajors were recruiting FL, and the level of talent there particularly at skill positions was exponentially better than what was available in MI. He was recruiting Florida in the 90's long before it was fashionable. His relationship with Coach Bertani at North Miami produced a lot of talent for WMU.
I can't fault him for recruiting FL. But I think the competition down there has stiffened among mid majors. The perception (right or wrong) that WMU wasn't interested in MI kids was already established. I think had he stayed he likely would have been recruiting FL a bit less than he had before, but I think he would have had continued success recruiting the Midwest had that become more of is focus.
I do think that he and Ryan were doing the bulk of the quality recruiting the last few years, and his staff was not really getting it done (might have been attributed to the lack of continuity, and the East Coast influence on the staff). I don't think the staff the last few years had built relationships in the Midwest, they were east coast guys. BC and Jr. were focused on FL.
/
"The Factory" manufacturers a new piece of equipment
