Will Harmon's replacement shift focus?

notanative

notanative

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Watching the CWS, I come away from each game with the impression that the guys on the teams I'm watching are more mature and more athletic than the guys I see on our team.

If that's the result of recruiting (and Augie having accepted the players that were tendered to him), do we think that will change?

Just wondering.
 
Count 7 Greater Houston players on 2012 roster -- is this number steeply down from previous years? Or, could it be the number of standout players from this area that's down? Wayne Graham can't keep all of 'em.
 
One that will jump in right away and be good next year is Ty Culbreth. You will be really pleased with what you see.

Kind of suprising that neither of the studs in A&M's back yard signed with them (Culbreth - Bryan, Ferrell - Consolidated).
 
Viper:
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Count the Central Texas players on the roster.

Harmon was getting lazy in his recruiting practices, avoiding flying and overnight trips wherever he could.

Those lazy recruiting practices made for a squad that eventually couldn't even make the NCAA tournament.

Sitting in his Austin office and watching highlight film will never get it done.

Any decent high school kid can put together five minutes of good-looking highlights in three years of baseball.

It was long past time for Harmon to be gone.

UT Baseball Roster
 
Just to date myself, I was on campus for the 1983 National Championship. I have not found a complete roster handy but I know off the top of my head that we had Roger Clemens, Make Capel, David Dennie, Billy Bates and Johnny Sutton on that team, all Houston area kids. The next year Greg Swindell and Rusty Richards and some others came in. My point being that there is plenty of orange blood and a ton of baseball talent in the greater Houston area. We should be hitting that area hard and not letting Rice and A&M cherry pick the talent. That's nuts. Clemens and Capel both have kids that are high school studs in the Houston area right now. Are we recruiting them? I know we have the catcher coming in that is Capel's teammate, so that is good, but it sure seems we are relying too much on Central Texas kids. I know Central Texas produces a great deal of baseball talent but we need to cover the entire state at a minimum.
 
This is a very interesting discussion, but it gets to the heart of the problem with Texas baseball. In fairness to TH, there is plenty of talent in centex. Not as much as Houston, but enough if you lock down the locals even assuming that the Baptist get a few. There is much more here than there was in 1983. You will always have people who want to go someplace else for college and this is not a reflection on Texas, it just means they wanted to go away for school.

Can the next guy (Butler or whoever) do better? I think UT needs to look and recruit nationally because Houston is never going to be very easy again. Augie is going to have to leave the office and play some road games out of conference though. That is how you get exposure. When Texas dropped the weekend series planned with Rice they dropped their entree into the city. Austin might as well be Lubbock or Oklahoma to Houston kids. If you play in different parts of the country you can attract kids from that part of the world. The Big 12 is a killer for Texas baseball because Kansas and Oklahoma are not exactly hotbeds for talent. TCU is going get their share of the metroplex recruits and UT and the Okie schools will fight over the rest.

I was on campus in 1983 as well and there are 2 very important differences that make recruiting Houston today an uphill battle.

1. Wayne Graham was not the coach at Rice then. He has a great track record down there and no one makes fun of a Rice degree. For local kids, particularly those with brains, it is easy to stay home when Wayne makes an offer. He can tell those kids that Rice has made the NCAA tournament each year since 1995 and as any Rice fan will tell you (over and over) they have won and shared in a conference title each of the last 17 years. The point being that even when they don't make the CWS they have pretty good years and the degree, that almost all Rice players get, has value. Incredible value in the Houston kids' hometown.

2. I think, and time will tell, the dumb ones who can't get in to Rice will find playing baseball in the SEC more appealing. They may not be so dumb that they want to go to A$M, but they can go to another SEC campus and get a game in the home state now and then. Lots of kids from Houston feel no attachment to a conference with one destination (Austin) and a bunch of crappy places you would not want to visit unless you were forced to do so. Houston has always provided the SEC with players in the past, but I suspect having the agroids in the conference will only increase that appeal.

In conclusion, in Houston, we have a problem.
 
That was a good question. I contacted a Rice insider who tells me that Graham just signed a 5 year extension making him the coach for the next 6 years. So I don't think we can count on the hooters messing it up until then.
 
Re: So I don't think we can count on the hooters messing it up until then.

That assumes that he stays the coach he is now for the remainder of his contract. One or two years missing the NCAA's or not going as far as the fans think Rice should,and I'll be willing to be you'll hear that it's time for him to move on. That is, of course, unless Rice fans are less prone than some others we know to think anything less than a national championship is reason for firing.
 
An excellent hitting coach teaching approach and mechanics is the first place to start. There is terrific talent all over Texas, but virtually all of the position players need sound instruction to have success at the plate against D1 pitching. Texas has not had that level of instruction in years and it shows.
 
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