Thursday, February 7, 2013

2013 National Signing Day

Yesterday, we did get a good, but not great class. The reason I don't call it a great class is because of the miss at DT, which is a need position, and we screwed up at Booker T. Washington High School last week with the stunt our staff pulled with pulling Kirk's 'ship at the championship parade. If you heard Ice Harris the next day, he tells you from the inside how this all went down and he tells you this was our staff's screw up. Harris said that we had some silents that we had or so we thought. One of those was Terrell Brooks, the JUCO DT out of TX, but Tuesday Night, he chose to go to Baylor. You could tell that the BTW fiasco, was going to be ugly and yesterday, that turned out to be the case.

Let me say that I'm a big fan of Al and what's he done so far. However, when you saw him on ESPNU yesterday, he looked like a beaten man. He knows that we screwed up at BTW and had better get this fixed very quickly with not only Ice, but the rest of the coaches in Miami-Dade, or next year, could be a replay of yesterday, only worse. When 6 announced yesterday, he told our staff basically FU, when he committed to FSU and Kirk 5 minutes later goes to Arkansas. Two major studs from a pipeline inner-city school lost because of the staff's stupidity. 

Next year, we're talking about not only BTW, but MNW (whom we did well with), and Central and I hope this staff learns from its screw-up at BTW last week. 

Now, to Keith Bryant. If you read Matt Porter's article in the Palm Beach Post yesterday after Bryant signed, the comments his brother made were pretty damning. Keith Bryant decided a month ago where he was going and when Jimbo Fisher made that visit to Bryant's home, that sealed our fate. You have to counter with Golden in that situation, not send assistants to his home. Another reason we  cooled on him after he de-committed from us was the fact that we were going after the JUCO DTs (Lavon Hooks and Toby Johnson). Lavon Hooks ultimately chose Ole Miss and Toby Johnson will decided on February 19th where he will go to College. The damage had been done, Bryant it turned out was out of reach a month ago. 

As for Jaynard Bostwick. This was a big loss early in the day yesterday, when he went to Florida. This is one we'd been after for a while now. In the end, Mom won out over Dad. It hurts more because we have his cousin, Armbrister on the team. Tough to take especially when you consider its a bitter rival like Florida that stole him away from us. 

Simply put, you can't have two stud DTs in your own backyard get away to bitter rivals like Florida and Florida State and that hurts that we don't have either Bryant or Bostwick today as CANES. 

Overall, we signed a good class. We signed 16 players, which to be fair to Golden, was the number he talked about in his final presser of the season. Some said, myself included, we would get 20, but 16, considering what we did, wasn't too bad. The down side was just 4 from South Florida (2 from Miami-Dade and 2 from Broward). The eye opener is that we signed 3 from NJ (Olsen, Knighton, Muhammad) and a 4th from NYC (Staten Island Tottenville Gus Edwards). Golden made it clear in his first presser back in 2010, we were going to be very active in the Northeast and yesterday proved that point. 

Now, there are going to have to be some fences mended at BTW and Golden has to nip this problem in the bud very quickly and with Mario and OC Coley aboard, come 2014, when the NCAA cuffs come off, we're going to come out like gangbusters and clean up South Florida.