Teuhema brothers

jayakris

jayakris

2,500+ Posts
The recruiting experts' feeling continues to move closer and closer to LSU flipping 3-star Sione Teuhema (2014) from us to them. That would probably mean that his younger brother 5-star Maea Teuhema (2015) is probably a goner too. Terrible, if so.

It is quite unclear what is happening, because the family has completely shut it down with the media since the sudden unannounced trip to LSU this past weekend that both the bothers took. The general thinking was that Maea was more thrilled about LSU already, while Sione supposedly liked Austin better. So, if Sione signs with LSU, the younger brother probably would be gone next year (or may decommit now itself, I guess).

The LSU recruiting observers seem quite confident that they are flipping to LSU. The Texas recruiting experts suddenly don't seem to be able to find out much, and there is also serious doubt if Texas coaches were told of their LSU visit or not.

This doesn't look good as of now... But we may only know on Wednesday.

In my view, it is in very poor taste for any recruit to flip only on the signing day, without decommitting openly from the Univ to which they had stayed committed (for like 7-8 months), or at least telling the coaches about it beforehand, if not the public and media.
 
So it's poor taste if they decide to go elsewhere, after the coach who was recruiting them is fired. But it's OK for us to take a guy from Colorado?

They are kids. Do a better job of recruiting.

Or, may we can write a rule that it's not a touchdown against us unless you put it in writing at least 15 minutes before hand.
 
ESPN is reporting they just decommitted.
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Yeah, it seemed like they would, ever since last Friday. I'm glad they didn't go for the NSD day surprise or anything.

This is a big loss for Charlie. From the looks of it, it is not even clear if he recruited these two hard enough, actually. Why it is so, we wouldn't know. May be ran out of time last week in trying an in-home (if I am not mistaken, there could have been an in-home visit? Not sure). May be that should've been done if it was possible, especially after Sione made a visit to OkSt last week. But there are also some confusing family angles and all that with these two kids, that makes me wonder if the new staff had trouble working through all that. I am just guessing, but those things can happen when you hardly have much time to get up to speed.

It takes out the only 5-star guy we had for the 2015 class too (Maea Seuhema). There is talk that we will also lose Patrick Vahe (4-star OG of 2015) if these two are gone, as they are all connected. So, this could well be a serious triple-strike.

We better get those two OOS DTs tomorrow (at least one of them, but really we do need both), or it would be quite a disaster-finish for the 2014 class, relatively speaking, though it will still be a top-15 type class.

Now, CS has ZERO margin of error in pulling off results in the coming year. The coaches have worked their rears off the last 2-3 weeks to get to a lot of schools, but a lot of guys are already hot with many other places, and there is not yet indications of any serious momentum towards us - but we will see what happens with our junior days within a month. Nothing short of winning big this coming year may help build momentum for a good 2015 class.

In any case, If we do not win big right next year and end up with another poorer class in 2015, then it is 3 straight years of sub-par recruiting and it causes problems. Of course, these coaches may be able to just flat-out coach up 3-star guys, but that rarely gets you the NC type results. You do need nearly 45 odd four-star or better recruits on campus to shoot for that, though top-10 rankings are possible just with pure coaching. Just win right away in 2014, and only that will cure our problems.
 
In my view, whatever reason led a recruit to want to come to Texas in the first place,
would have improved with the coaching change. Not the other way around.

If the coaching change -- a decision to put a team on the field that will strike fear
in opponents and basically do to everyone from now on what the Seahawks just did to Denver
-- if that decision caused a player to look at greener pastures, for whatever reason...
then that player was not going to cut it here.

He had the wrong set of values for coming to Texas in the first place,
and the coaching change just vetted the situation.

A lot of people have no idea what is coming. By this time next year they will.
And some players may find the talk back home with relatives and friends, something like,
"Man you sure as hell shoulda gone to Texas. That is one bad *** team now."
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Hu_Fan, I hope that you're right but, from the looks of things right now, the new staff would appear to have underachieved to an alarming extent. Some of us expected a late surge, not a late collapse. Regardless of how effective we are at coaching up the talent, there must be a base load of talent to begin with...

I am genuinely concerned, and likely disappointed...
 
Exactly....Why a defensive recruit would bail on this staff is beyond me. However, I am not going to get my panties in a wad over a HS recruit that has never played a down of D1 colege football. Just cause he looks good against other HS players does not mean this will translate into a good college player. We should know that better than anyone else. I believe there is talent here already. If they will be coached up and taught how to block and tackle I will be very happy. Lets see how 2014 works out. If we play like I think we can, we will be singing a different tune this time next year.
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dukesteer, I would say it was wrong to assume that there would be a bump when you are replacing a highly-successful coach who hardly has had great success lately but was still landing some top-10 type recruiting classes, mostly on his name. Those weren't players sold on Texas as much as on Mack Brown, and on the hope that he still might have some magic left. Also remember that a lot of people including current players who never hated Mack wouldn't be able to help much in recruiting either. The committed guys could well decide not to take a risk, whatever you tell them about a new coach's coaching credentials are, barring a splash hire (which I was not in favor of, and probably wasn't going to happen anyway).

I said way back that chances of a successful hire following a successful coach at the top programs have generally not been more than 30% or so. To all those who said here that anybody could come to Texas and recruit like Mack Brown used to do, it was just simply not true. That is not true at any program, and we have all seen it happen many times over in many top programs including ours. Some of us wanted to wait till the very last straw before letting Mack go, for this kind of reasons.

But my feeling is that Mack himself would have lost some of these players had he stayed too (because of serious uncertainties about him!)

Generally new coaches with 3-4 weeks time-frame never manage to pull in a top-10 class. At least I don't remember that happening anywhere. But, like I said earlier, if Mack's latest class was say around #25 nationally, I would have expected a bump by 5 to 10 spots with some 3 and 4 stars joining. Like say the PennState case now. But if it was already ranked #12 nationally when a coach is fired, you could only pray that it would stay inside top-15 by NSD. I said it the week we hired CS, and that's exactly what happened. This was all quite expected, in my view. Actually Charlie has done quite well not to let many key pieces decommit.

But with a little luck and without confusion about family (and a third party looking for an academic scholarship and stuff like that, as rumored in other sites), Charlie would have done better, and held on to these two kids too. But in short time frames, this kind of stuff can fall through.

If we get those two DTs, or at least 1, tomorrow, I would say that Charlie did about as well as I imagined. May be even better because he actually took care of some key depth issues by holding on to some important pieces (QB, TE, OL also). he lost a 5-star guy who could have been used for momentum for 2015 today, which makes him have to create momentum in other ways. That is all there is. Win games, and we will be fine.

I was much more worried initially about the quality of the new coaching STAFF and the ability of a new guy to put together a group that would COACH well. A staff that has some experience to set up the recruiting system well, who all work hard. Charlie did handle that very well in my opinion, and I think we are not in such a bad situation that we cannot win immediately by simply doiing some coaching on the existing talent. THAT is the good news. I could think of many other coach hires when it would have been a bigger doubt in my mind. That comes from the HC's reputation as one who rolls up his sleeves and coaches tough football.

But on recruiting, there is concern now, that we need to start building the 2015 class from scratch. But there is time for us to show results and take care of it - especially as our coaches have done a lot of OOS legwork also. So don't worry too much. Just hope for Ash to be healthy for a whole year for us to get a 10-win (or better) season without any embarrassing losses for recruiting to pick up next fall.

The only thing we should see in these things, is that Charlie is not going to do snake-oil sales or anything. Not his style. To do better now itself, you probably needed some harsh snake-oil sales and cutting some deals on further commits and stuff like that. He didn't do such things in any of these cases, and that's probably good sign in the long run, for program stability, if he can coach and win like we expect.
 
I believe there has been a lot of negative recruiting against Texas, when most everyone with a brain, knew that Mack would be leaving. Add to that with the success of sec, it is easy for competing recruiters, to tell recruits that if they want to go to nfl and play in the best conference, then you don't want to go to Texas. With Strong's late start, most everyone else is finishing the race, and we're just out of the blocks. I don't know of any specific negative recruiting, but if I was wanting a Texas commit to come to my school, I could find reasons why they should not come here. By Texas being in transition, it just gives other competing schools more leverage to get players we would otherwise bring in, to go elsewhere. We just have to have faith in Strong and his staff, in the long run, to know what they are doing.
 
Perhaps Strong and the rest of us underestimated the extent to which competitive programs have established roots in Texas. Those roots were built over...years. That's why I was personally very disappointed when Strong decided to retain almost none of Brown's staff. We did have some keepers... Oscar Giles had a pretty good track record IMHO.

Hey, I will be more than happy to eat my words later but, for now, I remain concerned.
 
I've said this before but it is my personal opinion that relationships are huge for the high school recruits. They may not have necessarily been commiting to Mack, but it may have been a commitment to the position coach. These guys all put on a tough face but on the inside it may be that commiting to a university as opposed to a coach is too faceless and cold. They need to know who has their back so to speak. But as for LSU grabbing these two brothers, I have to admit I don't know if the LSU coaches had built a relationship with them during the past year or so or if the LSU coaches knew them as well (or not as well so to speak) as our new coaching staff do. If so, then it is a puzzle...
 
The fact is if in their hearts they wanted to be HORNS, then they wouldn't have decommitted. I say so long to these two their will be others who really have it in their hearts to be HORNS who will come along.
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Sumiln's first class wasn't terrible. It was a small class, but he still had 2 5* recruits in Trey WIliams and Thomas Johnson (who he flipped from Texas). He also held on to almost all the players that were committed to Sherman. He didn't have nearly as many defections as Strong.

Sumlins first class:
2 - 5 star
8 - 4 star
9 - 3 star

Strong first class:
0 - 5 star
7 - 4 star
14 - 3 star

Strong has now had 10 decomitts. Sumlin didn't have anywhere near that many.

I guess the thing I find most surprising about all of this is not necessarily the decomits from Texas, but that there has been no noticeable bump with the strong hire. Sumlin already has a ton of momentum with the 2015 guys as well so it seems like Strong is behind the 8-ball with that class as well. Things have certainly done a 180 from 5 years ago.
 
L$U.
This is an old, yet still frequent story and one which should surprise none of us. In this instance, ask yourself why the parents suddenly became interested in the recruiting process, on the last weekend before signing day where the guardian gets to stay home for this visit.
 
Texas wasn't exactly tearing it up on the field when Sumlin was hired. A&M has lots of momentum and interest right now, so the competitive environment has been a little different for Strong.
 
I can't help but think that Coach Strongs no-nonsense, hard work approach is a turn-off for some kids.

Some kids like the idea of being an athlete at a school rather than being the athlete. Certain treatment and privileges they might have gotten under a previous coach they might not necessarily get now.

If a kids afraid of hard work, I'm not sure I would want him anyway.

Not saying this is the case with these guys, but it could enter into the mind of a 17-18 year old that thinks he's going to be the next big thing at the next level.
 
HornTYS, I too have wondered that and if a kid is afraid of a little hard work, do we really want them?

Strong beat Florida in a bowl game 2 years ago with lower star athletes. I think he will coach the kids he gets up and do some good things here.
 
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