For those that are old enough to remember,

O

Orangeblood90

250+ Posts
How does Texas' ability to get a recruit today compare with the prior golden era of Coach Royal.

I understand that was before recruiting rankings, the internet and so forth, but I'm sure there were still well known high school players and did we just take whoever we wanted.

Makes me really appreciate these times under Coach Brown, it will probably not always be like this. Enjoy the ride.
 
A lot of great players went to other schools because they got better offers.
From my earlier memories the color of their skin.

Royal certainly got his share but the talent pool compared to today was a wading pool. Royal did have an advantage of being able to offer a lot more players. He developed a lot of talent while they played on the freshman team. I suppose a lot of posters do know the freshman played a conference schedule.

The facilities and coaching around today just do not compare. We did not have a weight room we did our exercise on the field. Hell when I was a freshman we did not wear faceguards. My ENT keeps wanting to straighten my nose.
 
as ole says, things are very different. i really don't think you can make reasonable comparisons.

for instance, coach royal could take as many kids as he wanted to feed. he used to like to mention one of his all-time best offensive linemen and say he took the kid on a hunch. the young man caught fire and became a much better player in college than he was in high school.

also, the availability of information to us recruitniks was extremely limited back then. newspapers and magazines generated the lists, and virtually no fan knew what a kid looked like unless he simply went to watch the kid play. therefore, we seldom knew who were the kids the various coaches most wanted. we are still not 100% sure today, but we have a much better guess.

as far as perceived success, i think the two coaches are pretty similar. royal had spectacular hits in recruiting and spectacular misses. same with mack. when royal had a couple of exceptional classes he tore things up. same with mack.
 
For years recruiting info was the HS section of Dave Campbell's magazine. Various newspspes would generate an all-star list generally populated by the local Friday night heros.

DKR was able to take double the number of recruits that Mack Brown can take with a 'ship total of 120. There was a Freshman team and the "varsity". There were no redshirts.

DKR was on a role and Texas would have stayed at or near the top for a long time. Then SMU went professional and bought all the kids that Texas and OU would have split between themselves.

There were a few sets of weights tucked away somewhere under the bleachers. At least even as the backup tackling dummy I had a facemask.
 
When Coach Royal was here, there weren't any recruiting limits. He took players with little chance of seeing the field here, just to keep them away from okie, agricultural, and the like.

Mack has to live with limits, but that being said, he's done a great job every year at bringing in talent, and is in the midst of a spectacular recruiting year for '10.

This is really apples and oranges...Royal and Brown both excelled, and excel, in their times. It's frightening for opponents to speculate what Mack could do if there were NO recruiting limits.
 
You guys keep posting that Royal had no recruiting limits. That's wrong, and you should stop because repeating it is the rival schools' facorite criticism of Royal.

The NCAA did not have limits established. The SWC did have limits. You could have 110 players on scholarship at one time. The recruiting class limit was (110 - # of upperclassmen on scholarship).

I went through the Dave Campbell summaries from the '60s, and counted class sizes once. Texas averaged almost 30 recruits per year. The Ags averaged about three players more.
 
Thanks T...as you get older, the memory is the first thing to go...thank goodness! You're right that the SWC had some limits...I guess it just seemed that the good guys got most of the good players, except for those that opted to spend their college years north of the muddy Red.
 
Mac Brown and company have access to so much information now with the internet. Heck they don't even have to leave their office to evaluate someone's talent. Royal got great talent because the great players wanted to play for Texas. I don't think Royal had to worry about a kids character as much because at that time kids did not have access to as many drugs, not everyone had a car, and if you screwed up your dad beat the evil out of you and deservedly so.
 
Several things were different back in the day. Recruiting was not quite a year round affair in Royal's day because recruiting was largely contained within a compressed time-frame.

First, as others point out, the numbers were different in Royal's day. 110 sounds correct. Then the NCAA began its slow contraction down to the 85/25 rule, and that rule became established by the late 70s, I think.

Second, there was no "early recruiting" for the most part. In fact, Mack Brown started early recruiting in Texas. Before Brown, recruiting heated up around November, with players verballing mainly in January. Jackie Sherrill became the master of January recruiting for the Aggies in the State of Texas in the early 80s.

Third, there was a newspaper called the Dallas Times-Herald. The DTH would send out a questionnaire to each SWC coach to list his group of 'can't miss' senior high school recruits. If a HS player got 4 or more votes, he was considered a "blue chip recruit". The more votes he got, the higher up the DTH blue chip list the guy was slotted. The DTH Blue Chip list came out after Christmas each year -- I think the first Sunday after New Years. Which jived with when the kids would be visiting the colleges, etc.

Of course, other newspapers also had rankings that came out about the same time, such as the still published Fab55 of the Austin Statesman-American, but no list was revered as much as the DTH list because the coaches actually compiled that DTH blue chip list. The DTH list became defunct in the late 70s because the SWC coaches wanted to hold their recruiting targets closer to the vest.

Until the newspapers came out, especially the DTH, folks would, yes, rely on Dave Campbell's Texas Football, which was always great with the raw numbers and high school stars. Still is. Dave Campbell's actually talks to the high school coaches so that is the key to their long-standing success.

Around 1976 or so, a guy up in Michigan named Joe Terranova came out with, I think, the first "for pay" list of national recruits. Terranova is the guy who ignited recruiting on a national basis.

Of course, the internet changed everything. Everyone knows the story of "Gotch Yarbrough", and while that story is funny, before the internet, many coaches from low income colleges would simply read sources like Dave Campbell's for their leads.

Modern Texas football recruiting was established by the one and only, Mack Brown. Mack Brown changed everything, giving us at Texas the recruiting with which we are familiar with today.

Hope this helps.
 
The original 30/95 limits were actually started in the early 70's around 1974. That and Barry Switzer were 2 of the reasons among others Darrell Royal stepped down in 1976. After the Earl Campbell class in 1974, he was badly outrecruited by Switzer in 1975 when most of Switzer's recruiting class was from Texas, including many or most of the top players lead by Billy Simms. Royal's last recruiting class brought in Johnny LAM Jones and many of the defensive players that played roles in Aker's early defenses.

The 30/95 rules was changed to 25/85 years later, I think in the mid to late 80's.
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