In Reply to: Dorrell's OL recruiting. posted by TheHappyBurgermeister on March 24, 2025 at 12:54:01
None of those guys were any good. To be fair, Lanis had to retire. I don't know how far your actual memory goes (as opposed to your internet browser), but Justin Brown and Brandon Bennett were absolute jokes. They were not coveted recruits and really had no business in the Pac-10. In fact, I recall a story about Justin Brown at the time (I just remember the story, can't verify if it's true) that his coaches and teammates at LB Poly could not believe UCLA was recruiting him, that it caused some laughter.
Shannon Tevaga was a good recruit. But we also got his brother, Sonny Tevaga. He was a joke who weighed like 350 pounds. You couldn't develop these guys with a magic wand.
Micah Kia was a pretty good recruit. Chris Joseph was a Rhodes Scholar, so that's good. But there were a lot of OL guys who had very little talent and didn't even belong at UCLA. This was a recurring theme with KD that would later rear its ugly head again under Chip: the sudden appearance of large numbers of off-the-wall or out-of-the-blue signees (aka Sleepers) who simply did not belong at UCLA. Contrast that with Neuheisel and Mora, who brought in their share of guys that sucked, but who at least often looked the part or had some good offers.
But I think we are conflating two issues: is good recruiting the ability to lure coveted guys, or just the ability to bring in talented players? I consider it to be a combination of both, but with a heavy lean to the former (since I don't think too many, if any, coaches really have any real skill identifying diamonds in the rough.)
Karl Dorrell was not a good harvester of coveted guys by UCLA standards. Again, I'm not sure how far you go back, but it was Dorrell's recruiting that launched a thousand "character guy" threads on this board, i.e., posters defending his recruiting by saying that he emphasized "character" vs. posters like me who thought it was idiotic. We would see this again under Chip with the "Books-and-Ball" nonsense.
To me recruiting is just a numbers game: to be successful, you have to bring in large numbers of highly coveted guys (big/strong/fast/skilled) and simply hope enough of them will pan out and that you can coach up some others. Dorrell and Chip were both bad at bringing in the numbers, keeping the water level high enough, so to speak. Neuheisel and Mora combined to raise the level enough to win us some games, even though Mora was nothing special as a coach.