Bobcats2011
Active member
With modern day engineering we should be able to make that happen
2024 Offseason Thread
- Thread starter LTK5H
- Start date
Bobcats2011
Active member
well that didn’t take long
Bobcat AirRaid
Active member
The character portion of this staff’s eval screen might be disabled. That’s 2 out of 17 transfers this cycle, thus far.
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carmanjello325
Active member
resisting and evading arrest? that was finley so if there was no red flag with him then why would there be one now. #freetunmise. chances are this was not an isolated felony so if they let him on the team knowing what they should have already known why all of a sudden care now?
Simbo0722
Member
Adeleye faced multiple charges, including unlawfully carrying a weapon, evading arrest with a vehicle, reckless driving and failure to identify. While he pleaded not guilty on the failure to identify charge, his only felony charge is evading arrest, with the rest categorized as misdemeanors. All charges were filed between Feb. 21-23. ALL ON CAMPUS. SEE YA................
Mr. softie on the field trying to be mister tough guy off of it.
B
Bakertxst04
Guest
Attendance Trends for FBS Teams in Texas
Year-over-year and five-year averages reveal attendance trends for FBS programs in Texas, including the Texas Longhorns, Texas A&M Aggies, Texas Tech Red Raiders, Houston Cougars and North Texas Mean Green.
www.texasfootball.com
We have a genuinely good season and attendance jumps by 20%. Would love to see us closer to selling out the stadium, but of course Mike Craven finds a way to make it about UTSA. Not saying that we don't get good attendance from scheduling a rival school that's an hour away from us, but of course he makes it sound like the only we can get good attendance is by scheduling the dirty birdies. It's funny because when talking about UNT, their attendance was bad despite scheduling UTSA.
And then he doesn't give us credit for helping them pack the alamodome lol.
And he makes excuses for SHSUs high school like attendance
And he makes excuses for SHSUs high school like attendance
Craven is a biased clown.
Without the TXST game UTSA's attendance is down 12% year over year and 4% from its 5-year average.
Without the TXST game UTSA's attendance is down 12% year over year and 4% from its 5-year average.
slycat
Active member
He gives UTSA credit for boosting or theoretically boosting multiple schools but utsa just does it on their own. He just can't hide his bias.
All of Frank Wilson's recruits have graduated and alumnus from other schools are no longer supporting UTSA, except by force through sales taxes. Traylor has tried his best to leave but no one else wants him.
The mystique and imperfect legacy of junior day at Mack Brown's Texas
Texas junior day wasn’t the only one of its kind, nor was it the first, but it became best-in-class.
theathletic.com
This is a really good article from the Athletic for those of you with a subscription. I find it worth the low cost.
Here are some quotes from the article that stood out to me:
"In retrospect, (Riley) Dodge theorized that the Longhorns took his commitment because he “wasn’t gonna scare Garrett (Gilbert) away.”
"That had an impact on the staff’s decision to bypass (Andrew) Luck, too. Giles, who recruited the Houston area and built a relationship with Luck and his family, said had the Longhorns offered him, “Andrew Luck would have walked to Texas. He loved Texas.”
“There’s a fine line there,” said Texas State head coach G.J. Kinne, an ’06 junior day invitee who signed with Texas in 2007. “You’ve got to trust your evaluation and go with their sophomore and junior film. At the same time, it doesn’t take a lot to watch Sergio Kindle and figure out, ‘We want that guy.’”
“I’m not trying to tell Mack Brown what to do, but maybe they should have done it for the top 10 guys and not extend it to the rest of the guys,” Kinne said.
“Recruiting is very inexact,” Dykes said. “Depending on the year, there may be 30 or 40 can’t-miss prospects. But then there’s this group of 350 that there’s really not that big of a difference between them. So if you start taking those guys early, without really getting a good evaluation on them, all of a sudden, you could end up with a lot of misses.”
The whole article:
Sam Khan Jr. and Max Olson
Mar 6, 2024
Outside of Mack Brown’s office on Feb. 24, 2007, two blue-chip high school quarterback recruits waited to hear whether they’d receive a coveted scholarship offer from the Texas Longhorns.
Riley Dodge, a gunslinger from perennial Texas prep power Southlake Carroll High, waited eagerly. Sitting on a couch nearby was a Houston-area multi-sport athlete with a golden arm and NFL bloodlines. His name? Andrew Luck.
Brown, Texas’ stately head coach who was just 13 months removed from leading the Longhorns to a national championship, called the Dodges in first.
The room they entered included two burnt-orange couches flanking a coffee table topped with multiple trophies, including a Heisman. Game balls, helmets, championship rings and other mementos packed the room, with photos on every wall. “It was like a damn museum,” said former Texas defensive line coach Oscar Giles.
Before the dawn of year-round recruiting, elaborate photo shoots and countless unofficial visits, getting a face-to-face with a national championship head coach in February on Texas’ junior day was an experience reserved for a select few recruits. Dodge, who grew up with burnt orange draped on his walls, soaked it all in. “It was definitely surreal,” he said.
After a long conversation, Brown uttered the words Dodge had been waiting to hear for a lifetime: “Riley, we’re going to offer you a scholarship to the University of Texas.”
“Well, Coach, I’m gonna make it easy, I’m gonna commit right now,” Dodge replied.
The Lucks were called in next for a different conversation. After meeting with Brown, the future No. 1 pick left junior day without an offer.
Texas junior day wasn’t the only one of its kind, nor was it the first, but it became best-in-class. Although junior days are now standard practice nationwide, they weren’t widespread when the Longhorns launched theirs 20 years ago. Texas’ appeal at its peak, Brown’s charisma and the then-exclusive nature of a Texas offer combined to create a unique, if complicated, success story.
“Texas took it and ran with it,” former SMU, Arkansas and Texas high school head coach Chad Morris said. “And that became the standard.”
When Brown coached at North Carolina in the 1990s, he noticed Big Ten programs offering elite local prospects before the Tar Heels could.
“John Cooper and Joe Paterno were getting all the in-state players wrapped up in Ohio and Pennsylvania early, and then they would be able to go recruit nationally,” Brown said. “All the coaches were saying, ‘Penn State’s offered, Ohio State’s offered, but you didn’t offer.’”
So Brown started a junior day at UNC. When he arrived at Texas in 1998, the pace of recruiting in the state was slower. Junior days weren’t common, and most scholarship offers were reserved for seniors.
Several programs hosted junior days in the early 2000s, including LSU, Miami, Ohio State and Texas A&M. They served as early open houses for the upcoming recruiting class: second-semester juniors who would become seniors in the fall.
Brown hosted his first junior day at Texas in 2004. When the Longhorns played their spring game weeks later, they had one verbal commitment for the ’05 class. The second junior day, on the heels of a Rose Bowl win over Michigan, was more fruitful. After the ’05 spring game, Texas had locked in 17 commits for ’06.
“Junior days were critical,” former Texas offensive coordinator Greg Davis said. “That was kind of the beginning of early commitments.”
From 2001 to ’09, Brown led Texas to a 101-16 record and nine consecutive 10-win seasons. Texas’ memorable 2005 campaign, in which the Longhorns won their first national championship since 1970, became the spark for their early recruiting dominance.
“When we won the national championship, the proof was in the pudding,” said Giles, a former Texas defensive lineman and the team’s defensive ends coach from 2005 to ’13. “Guys were like, ‘OK, this is where I want to be. I don’t have to go to USC or Alabama or Oklahoma. I can stay at Texas and win a national championship.’”
After landing the No. 1 recruiting class in 2002, the Longhorns’ next three classes ranked 15th, 10th and 20th. Following the national title, which coincided with Texas’ junior day taking off, Texas signed top-five classes in six of the next seven cycles.
“Mack Brown used to offer 21 guys and get 21 commits,” said TCU head coach Sonny Dykes, who was a Texas Tech assistant at the time. “Before long, you were just trying to keep up with the Joneses.”
The junior days included the typical unofficial visit fodder: a campus tour, a stroll through the team facilities, meetings with coaches, a question-and-answer session with Texas players and, of course, a face-to-face with Brown.
But the invitation was the draw. After in-person assessments from the previous summer’s camp circuit and evaluation of junior season film, UT coaches zeroed in on who they believed were the state’s top prospects. Those — and only those — were summoned to the Forty Acres. In talent-laden Texas, “It was a who’s who of recruits,” Morris said.
“Texas junior day was the day that every kid in the state of Texas looked forward to, because if you got an invite to that, you knew they were probably gonna get an offer,” said Texas Tech tight ends coach Josh Cochran, who played offensive tackle at UT.
The Longhorns did not scatter scholarship offers out haphazardly. Brown preferred to meet with prospects individually before offering. Most of the time, those who attended landed an offer. But it wasn’t automatic.
When Brown sat with recruits one-on-one at the end of the visit, he would ask plenty of questions.
“Sometimes, along the way, he didn’t like the answers he got,” said Giles, now the defensive line coach at Houston. “Maybe Billy was looking at the sky or falling asleep. And he’d be like, ‘We’ll let you get back home,’ without making an offer.
“When you get them in that room, and it’s one-on-one, everything you do is being evaluated.”
To promote a family vibe, Brown’s wife Sally was usually in the office while he met with recruits. It wasn’t unusual for assistant coaches’ families to be on campus for the junior days, too.
“She wanted to meet the mom and wanted them to know, ‘We’re not just recruiting (the player), we’re recruiting you, too.’” Giles said. “‘You are gonna be part of this because it’s a family.’”
A Texas offer wasn’t necessarily evergreen. Brown was usually fine with a recruit going home, discussing it with their family and sleeping on it, but there was still a sense of urgency. Cochran remembers his high school coach telling him to have a plan for whether he wanted to commit if he got offered.
“Coach Brown’s whole pitch was, ‘We’re not sitting here and telling you that your offer is off the table if you don’t commit right now, but we’re not going to just hold a spot when there’s other people wanting it,’” Cochran said.
Commitments poured in quickly.
Ten of the state’s top 15 recruits in the 2007 class attended Texas’ junior day in February 2006. Seven committed, with six pledging either during junior day or within a week afterward, including two five-star recruits.
That kind of blockbuster haul became the norm. From 2007 to ’10, Texas racked up a total of 40 commitments off the first junior day of each class. The biggest haul came in 2010, when the Longhorns landed 13 commitments in one weekend.
On signing day in 2007, Brown noted that Texas brought in 28 prospects for official visits. All 28 committed, three decommitted and 25 signed.
“They could do that,” Dodge said, “because of the logo and the success.”
Brown’s charm made him as comfortable glad-handing boosters and businessmen as he was convincing elite high school players to come to Texas.
“If you could get it close, Mack would close it,” former Texas defensive backs coach Duane Akina said.
Cochran, who grew up in East Texas idolizing Brown, called it “the experience of a lifetime.”
“Sitting in there as a 17-year-old in (his) office with all his rings and everything, I mean, you can’t say no to that dude,” Cochran said. “I said ‘Yes’ as fast as I could.”
Once a player committed, Brown wanted assurances that he wouldn’t flirt for the remainder of the cycle. Former NFL and Texas running back Fozzy Whittaker, who attended UT’s 2006 junior day, recalled such a conversation after his commitment.
“We’re not going out and looking for any other running backs,” Whittaker said Brown told him. “We’re not going to keep trying to date other people once you commit, and we want that same type of commitment from you.”
Dodge said Brown told him, “If you take another visit somewhere else, you’re no longer committed to the University of Texas.”
Texas’ junior day success and the no-visit policy sped up the recruiting process. The Longhorns often got the majority of their class locked in before recruits’ senior seasons began.
“We were done, many times, by April when we had it rolling,” Akina said.
Of the 24 signees in Texas’ 2007 class, 15 committed by mid-April and 19 by late August. In 2008, all but two were committed by late April. In 2009, 19 of 20 signees committed by late May. In the 2011 class, every one of the 22 signees was committed before their senior season began.
The early recruiting success earned Brown the nickname “Mr. February.”
The intrigue surrounding Texas junior days became such that some top recruits felt slighted if they didn’t get an invitation.
“You had to be really, really careful who you invited to that first junior day,” Brown said. “Because if you didn’t invite them, they got as mad as they would have been happy if you did invite them.
“All the other coaches jumped on those guys and said, ‘They don’t even want you.’”
“It became such a big deal that we had to start a second junior day,” Giles said.
Quandre Diggs remembers. His older brother, Quentin Jammer, was a Texas legend. Diggs was a top-50 national recruit in the 2011 class and the most versatile player in Texas high school football.
Diggs knew Austin and grew up bleeding burnt orange. He was close with Jaxon Shipley, the younger brother of former Texas receiver Jordan Shipley. Diggs got a message from Jaxon informing him he had a junior day invitation for the coming weekend.
Diggs’ invitation was for the following weekend.
“The second junior day was kind of hit-or-miss — some guys got offers, some guys didn’t,” Diggs said. “You were kind of like a second-tier guy.”
Texas offered Shipley, who quickly committed. By the time Diggs trekked to Austin for his junior day, he was over the hard feelings. He woke up in his hotel excited, thinking about the possibility of committing once he got offered.
But he didn’t get an offer that day.
“I was pissed,” Diggs said. “I didn’t talk to my mom, I didn’t talk to my dad, all the way back home. I declined all interviews.”
He stewed over it and considered his dozens of other offers, including Alabama. The Longhorns offered in mid-March, and Diggs committed, citing family proximity, the chance to follow in Jammer’s footsteps and his comfort level with assistant Major Applewhite, who had campaigned hard for him to get an offer. But Diggs said the experience “wounded” his relationship with Brown.
“I just remember calling Major afterward and told Major, ‘Yo, I’m gonna make everybody pay for this s—,’” Diggs said.
The junior day success also raised the stakes on the staff’s early evaluations. No recruiting class has a 100 percent hit rate, and although plenty of Texas’ recruits went on to have great careers, some fell well short of expectations.
“There’s a fine line there,” said Texas State head coach G.J. Kinne, an ’06 junior day invitee who signed with Texas in 2007. “You’ve got to trust your evaluation and go with their sophomore and junior film. At the same time, it doesn’t take a lot to watch Sergio Kindle and figure out, ‘We want that guy.’”
And there are plenty of recruits who later turned into stars who never got a junior day invitation or a Texas offer.
“Recruiting is very inexact,” Dykes said. “Depending on the year, there may be 30 or 40 can’t-miss prospects. But then there’s this group of 350 that there’s really not that big of a difference between them. So if you start taking those guys early, without really getting a good evaluation on them, all of a sudden, you could end up with a lot of misses.”
Brown doesn’t believe Texas’ early-action strategy backfired because so many of his players went on to the NFL. But filling up a recruiting class quickly had a drawback.
“If you offered that many early, you have less chance of finding a diamond in the rough in the fall … because you’re already full,” Brown said. “That was a problem in Texas because we were just getting so many of them, and we didn’t have anybody back out.”
From the Class of 2005, the first to participate in a Texas junior day, through the end of the Brown era, the Longhorns went 88-29. But Texas’ 10-win season streak stopped in 2010, and the program plateaued.
“I’m not trying to tell Mack Brown what to do, but maybe they should have done it for the top 10 guys and not extend it to the rest of the guys,” Kinne said.
Ultimately, Brown stood by a recruiting philosophy Bo Schembechler shared with him during a visit to North Carolina in 1994.
“‘They’re all athletic enough or you wouldn’t have them on your board,’” Brown recalls Schembechler telling him. “‘They’re all academically in good shape enough or you wouldn’t have them on your board. So I pick the ones I like. If you like them, they’re gonna like you. If you don’t like them, they’re not gonna like you and they’re not gonna play hard for you to the fourth quarter.’
“So that’s pretty much what we’ve done,” Brown said. “We figure out which ones are the best players and then we bring them in and we don’t push them. We don’t beg them. We don’t lie to them. We just tell him who we are. And then we try to get enough good ones that should come here that it just works out.”
Dodge never suited up in the burnt orange and white.
His father, legendary Texas high school coach Todd Dodge, left Southlake Carroll to become the head coach at North Texas. The opportunity to be a Division I quarterback for his dad trumped potentially playing receiver or safety at Texas, so he flipped his commitment to North Texas that summer.
Texas didn’t sign a quarterback in the 2008 class, instead staking its future on Garrett Gilbert, a five-star from nearby Lake Travis High, for the 2009 class. Gilbert, who broke multiple state high school records and collected several national player of the year awards, committed the day after signing day in February 2008.
In retrospect, Dodge theorized that the Longhorns took his commitment because he “wasn’t gonna scare Garrett away.”
That had an impact on the staff’s decision to bypass Luck, too. Giles, who recruited the Houston area and built a relationship with Luck and his family, said had the Longhorns offered him, “Andrew Luck would have walked to Texas. He loved Texas.”
Gilbert’s Texas career was short-lived. He was famously thrown into Texas’ 2009 title game loss to Alabama after Colt McCoy’s right arm went numb. Gilbert started all 12 games in 2010, when Texas went 5-7, and he transferred in 2011 to SMU, where he finished his career before heading to the pros.
Luck became an All-American and two-time Heisman Trophy finalist at Stanford before Indianapolis chose him first overall in the 2012 NFL Draft.
But positive junior day memories endure for Riley Dodge, who later coached under Brown and is now the head coach at Southlake Carroll. His father was a former Texas quarterback, and the experience was “an absolute honor and a kind of a dream come true,” Riley said.
Eventually, the Longhorns were forced to adapt again. Competitors offered prospects earlier, and some even hosted junior days in January, before Texas’ event. Those trends coincided with Texas’ fall from the sport’s elite.
In hopes of keeping up while still preserving its junior day tradition, Texas had a stretch in the early 2010s when it told players they were “approved for an offer” to indicate their interest until the prospect made it to a junior day. By August 2012, Texas had ditched that strategy and outright offered recruits before their junior seasons began. Within the next year, the Longhorns took commitments from sophomores and even freshmen.
Brown’s Texas tenure ended in 2013 with a 158-48 record in 16 seasons, but the Longhorns went 30-21 in his last four years.
Recruiting has changed drastically. Early evaluations are now commonplace, with sophomores and freshmen landing offers. The early signing period, in mid-December, began in 2018 and is changing again. Spring official visits have made June one of the busiest months on the recruiting calendar.
Name, image and likeness deals now play a key role in recruiting, as does the transfer portal, for which schools — including North Carolina, where Brown returned to coach in 2019 — hold scholarship spots at the end of the year.
And today’s junior days are not nearly the big deal they were in the Longhorns’ halcyon days.
“Everybody gets a junior day invite nowadays,” Kinne said. “It’s more like, ‘Hey, let’s get you on campus, see you, get to know you.’ Kind of like checking a box.”
Brown said junior days still have value as a platform for early relationship building and a precursor to an official visit. “It’s a more aggressive spring than it used to be,” Brown said.
And in a way, Brown has himself to thank for that.
Mar 6, 2024
Outside of Mack Brown’s office on Feb. 24, 2007, two blue-chip high school quarterback recruits waited to hear whether they’d receive a coveted scholarship offer from the Texas Longhorns.
Riley Dodge, a gunslinger from perennial Texas prep power Southlake Carroll High, waited eagerly. Sitting on a couch nearby was a Houston-area multi-sport athlete with a golden arm and NFL bloodlines. His name? Andrew Luck.
Brown, Texas’ stately head coach who was just 13 months removed from leading the Longhorns to a national championship, called the Dodges in first.
The room they entered included two burnt-orange couches flanking a coffee table topped with multiple trophies, including a Heisman. Game balls, helmets, championship rings and other mementos packed the room, with photos on every wall. “It was like a damn museum,” said former Texas defensive line coach Oscar Giles.
Before the dawn of year-round recruiting, elaborate photo shoots and countless unofficial visits, getting a face-to-face with a national championship head coach in February on Texas’ junior day was an experience reserved for a select few recruits. Dodge, who grew up with burnt orange draped on his walls, soaked it all in. “It was definitely surreal,” he said.
After a long conversation, Brown uttered the words Dodge had been waiting to hear for a lifetime: “Riley, we’re going to offer you a scholarship to the University of Texas.”
“Well, Coach, I’m gonna make it easy, I’m gonna commit right now,” Dodge replied.
The Lucks were called in next for a different conversation. After meeting with Brown, the future No. 1 pick left junior day without an offer.
Texas junior day wasn’t the only one of its kind, nor was it the first, but it became best-in-class. Although junior days are now standard practice nationwide, they weren’t widespread when the Longhorns launched theirs 20 years ago. Texas’ appeal at its peak, Brown’s charisma and the then-exclusive nature of a Texas offer combined to create a unique, if complicated, success story.
“Texas took it and ran with it,” former SMU, Arkansas and Texas high school head coach Chad Morris said. “And that became the standard.”
When Brown coached at North Carolina in the 1990s, he noticed Big Ten programs offering elite local prospects before the Tar Heels could.
“John Cooper and Joe Paterno were getting all the in-state players wrapped up in Ohio and Pennsylvania early, and then they would be able to go recruit nationally,” Brown said. “All the coaches were saying, ‘Penn State’s offered, Ohio State’s offered, but you didn’t offer.’”
So Brown started a junior day at UNC. When he arrived at Texas in 1998, the pace of recruiting in the state was slower. Junior days weren’t common, and most scholarship offers were reserved for seniors.
Several programs hosted junior days in the early 2000s, including LSU, Miami, Ohio State and Texas A&M. They served as early open houses for the upcoming recruiting class: second-semester juniors who would become seniors in the fall.
Brown hosted his first junior day at Texas in 2004. When the Longhorns played their spring game weeks later, they had one verbal commitment for the ’05 class. The second junior day, on the heels of a Rose Bowl win over Michigan, was more fruitful. After the ’05 spring game, Texas had locked in 17 commits for ’06.
“Junior days were critical,” former Texas offensive coordinator Greg Davis said. “That was kind of the beginning of early commitments.”
From 2001 to ’09, Brown led Texas to a 101-16 record and nine consecutive 10-win seasons. Texas’ memorable 2005 campaign, in which the Longhorns won their first national championship since 1970, became the spark for their early recruiting dominance.
“When we won the national championship, the proof was in the pudding,” said Giles, a former Texas defensive lineman and the team’s defensive ends coach from 2005 to ’13. “Guys were like, ‘OK, this is where I want to be. I don’t have to go to USC or Alabama or Oklahoma. I can stay at Texas and win a national championship.’”
After landing the No. 1 recruiting class in 2002, the Longhorns’ next three classes ranked 15th, 10th and 20th. Following the national title, which coincided with Texas’ junior day taking off, Texas signed top-five classes in six of the next seven cycles.
“Mack Brown used to offer 21 guys and get 21 commits,” said TCU head coach Sonny Dykes, who was a Texas Tech assistant at the time. “Before long, you were just trying to keep up with the Joneses.”
The junior days included the typical unofficial visit fodder: a campus tour, a stroll through the team facilities, meetings with coaches, a question-and-answer session with Texas players and, of course, a face-to-face with Brown.
But the invitation was the draw. After in-person assessments from the previous summer’s camp circuit and evaluation of junior season film, UT coaches zeroed in on who they believed were the state’s top prospects. Those — and only those — were summoned to the Forty Acres. In talent-laden Texas, “It was a who’s who of recruits,” Morris said.
“Texas junior day was the day that every kid in the state of Texas looked forward to, because if you got an invite to that, you knew they were probably gonna get an offer,” said Texas Tech tight ends coach Josh Cochran, who played offensive tackle at UT.
The Longhorns did not scatter scholarship offers out haphazardly. Brown preferred to meet with prospects individually before offering. Most of the time, those who attended landed an offer. But it wasn’t automatic.
When Brown sat with recruits one-on-one at the end of the visit, he would ask plenty of questions.
“Sometimes, along the way, he didn’t like the answers he got,” said Giles, now the defensive line coach at Houston. “Maybe Billy was looking at the sky or falling asleep. And he’d be like, ‘We’ll let you get back home,’ without making an offer.
“When you get them in that room, and it’s one-on-one, everything you do is being evaluated.”
To promote a family vibe, Brown’s wife Sally was usually in the office while he met with recruits. It wasn’t unusual for assistant coaches’ families to be on campus for the junior days, too.
“She wanted to meet the mom and wanted them to know, ‘We’re not just recruiting (the player), we’re recruiting you, too.’” Giles said. “‘You are gonna be part of this because it’s a family.’”
A Texas offer wasn’t necessarily evergreen. Brown was usually fine with a recruit going home, discussing it with their family and sleeping on it, but there was still a sense of urgency. Cochran remembers his high school coach telling him to have a plan for whether he wanted to commit if he got offered.
“Coach Brown’s whole pitch was, ‘We’re not sitting here and telling you that your offer is off the table if you don’t commit right now, but we’re not going to just hold a spot when there’s other people wanting it,’” Cochran said.
Commitments poured in quickly.
Ten of the state’s top 15 recruits in the 2007 class attended Texas’ junior day in February 2006. Seven committed, with six pledging either during junior day or within a week afterward, including two five-star recruits.
That kind of blockbuster haul became the norm. From 2007 to ’10, Texas racked up a total of 40 commitments off the first junior day of each class. The biggest haul came in 2010, when the Longhorns landed 13 commitments in one weekend.
On signing day in 2007, Brown noted that Texas brought in 28 prospects for official visits. All 28 committed, three decommitted and 25 signed.
“They could do that,” Dodge said, “because of the logo and the success.”
Brown’s charm made him as comfortable glad-handing boosters and businessmen as he was convincing elite high school players to come to Texas.
“If you could get it close, Mack would close it,” former Texas defensive backs coach Duane Akina said.
Cochran, who grew up in East Texas idolizing Brown, called it “the experience of a lifetime.”
“Sitting in there as a 17-year-old in (his) office with all his rings and everything, I mean, you can’t say no to that dude,” Cochran said. “I said ‘Yes’ as fast as I could.”
Once a player committed, Brown wanted assurances that he wouldn’t flirt for the remainder of the cycle. Former NFL and Texas running back Fozzy Whittaker, who attended UT’s 2006 junior day, recalled such a conversation after his commitment.
“We’re not going out and looking for any other running backs,” Whittaker said Brown told him. “We’re not going to keep trying to date other people once you commit, and we want that same type of commitment from you.”
Dodge said Brown told him, “If you take another visit somewhere else, you’re no longer committed to the University of Texas.”
Texas’ junior day success and the no-visit policy sped up the recruiting process. The Longhorns often got the majority of their class locked in before recruits’ senior seasons began.
“We were done, many times, by April when we had it rolling,” Akina said.
Of the 24 signees in Texas’ 2007 class, 15 committed by mid-April and 19 by late August. In 2008, all but two were committed by late April. In 2009, 19 of 20 signees committed by late May. In the 2011 class, every one of the 22 signees was committed before their senior season began.
The early recruiting success earned Brown the nickname “Mr. February.”
The intrigue surrounding Texas junior days became such that some top recruits felt slighted if they didn’t get an invitation.
“You had to be really, really careful who you invited to that first junior day,” Brown said. “Because if you didn’t invite them, they got as mad as they would have been happy if you did invite them.
“All the other coaches jumped on those guys and said, ‘They don’t even want you.’”
“It became such a big deal that we had to start a second junior day,” Giles said.
Quandre Diggs remembers. His older brother, Quentin Jammer, was a Texas legend. Diggs was a top-50 national recruit in the 2011 class and the most versatile player in Texas high school football.
Diggs knew Austin and grew up bleeding burnt orange. He was close with Jaxon Shipley, the younger brother of former Texas receiver Jordan Shipley. Diggs got a message from Jaxon informing him he had a junior day invitation for the coming weekend.
Diggs’ invitation was for the following weekend.
“The second junior day was kind of hit-or-miss — some guys got offers, some guys didn’t,” Diggs said. “You were kind of like a second-tier guy.”
Texas offered Shipley, who quickly committed. By the time Diggs trekked to Austin for his junior day, he was over the hard feelings. He woke up in his hotel excited, thinking about the possibility of committing once he got offered.
But he didn’t get an offer that day.
“I was pissed,” Diggs said. “I didn’t talk to my mom, I didn’t talk to my dad, all the way back home. I declined all interviews.”
He stewed over it and considered his dozens of other offers, including Alabama. The Longhorns offered in mid-March, and Diggs committed, citing family proximity, the chance to follow in Jammer’s footsteps and his comfort level with assistant Major Applewhite, who had campaigned hard for him to get an offer. But Diggs said the experience “wounded” his relationship with Brown.
“I just remember calling Major afterward and told Major, ‘Yo, I’m gonna make everybody pay for this s—,’” Diggs said.
The junior day success also raised the stakes on the staff’s early evaluations. No recruiting class has a 100 percent hit rate, and although plenty of Texas’ recruits went on to have great careers, some fell well short of expectations.
“There’s a fine line there,” said Texas State head coach G.J. Kinne, an ’06 junior day invitee who signed with Texas in 2007. “You’ve got to trust your evaluation and go with their sophomore and junior film. At the same time, it doesn’t take a lot to watch Sergio Kindle and figure out, ‘We want that guy.’”
And there are plenty of recruits who later turned into stars who never got a junior day invitation or a Texas offer.
“Recruiting is very inexact,” Dykes said. “Depending on the year, there may be 30 or 40 can’t-miss prospects. But then there’s this group of 350 that there’s really not that big of a difference between them. So if you start taking those guys early, without really getting a good evaluation on them, all of a sudden, you could end up with a lot of misses.”
Brown doesn’t believe Texas’ early-action strategy backfired because so many of his players went on to the NFL. But filling up a recruiting class quickly had a drawback.
“If you offered that many early, you have less chance of finding a diamond in the rough in the fall … because you’re already full,” Brown said. “That was a problem in Texas because we were just getting so many of them, and we didn’t have anybody back out.”
From the Class of 2005, the first to participate in a Texas junior day, through the end of the Brown era, the Longhorns went 88-29. But Texas’ 10-win season streak stopped in 2010, and the program plateaued.
“I’m not trying to tell Mack Brown what to do, but maybe they should have done it for the top 10 guys and not extend it to the rest of the guys,” Kinne said.
Ultimately, Brown stood by a recruiting philosophy Bo Schembechler shared with him during a visit to North Carolina in 1994.
“‘They’re all athletic enough or you wouldn’t have them on your board,’” Brown recalls Schembechler telling him. “‘They’re all academically in good shape enough or you wouldn’t have them on your board. So I pick the ones I like. If you like them, they’re gonna like you. If you don’t like them, they’re not gonna like you and they’re not gonna play hard for you to the fourth quarter.’
“So that’s pretty much what we’ve done,” Brown said. “We figure out which ones are the best players and then we bring them in and we don’t push them. We don’t beg them. We don’t lie to them. We just tell him who we are. And then we try to get enough good ones that should come here that it just works out.”
Dodge never suited up in the burnt orange and white.
His father, legendary Texas high school coach Todd Dodge, left Southlake Carroll to become the head coach at North Texas. The opportunity to be a Division I quarterback for his dad trumped potentially playing receiver or safety at Texas, so he flipped his commitment to North Texas that summer.
Texas didn’t sign a quarterback in the 2008 class, instead staking its future on Garrett Gilbert, a five-star from nearby Lake Travis High, for the 2009 class. Gilbert, who broke multiple state high school records and collected several national player of the year awards, committed the day after signing day in February 2008.
In retrospect, Dodge theorized that the Longhorns took his commitment because he “wasn’t gonna scare Garrett away.”
That had an impact on the staff’s decision to bypass Luck, too. Giles, who recruited the Houston area and built a relationship with Luck and his family, said had the Longhorns offered him, “Andrew Luck would have walked to Texas. He loved Texas.”
Gilbert’s Texas career was short-lived. He was famously thrown into Texas’ 2009 title game loss to Alabama after Colt McCoy’s right arm went numb. Gilbert started all 12 games in 2010, when Texas went 5-7, and he transferred in 2011 to SMU, where he finished his career before heading to the pros.
Luck became an All-American and two-time Heisman Trophy finalist at Stanford before Indianapolis chose him first overall in the 2012 NFL Draft.
But positive junior day memories endure for Riley Dodge, who later coached under Brown and is now the head coach at Southlake Carroll. His father was a former Texas quarterback, and the experience was “an absolute honor and a kind of a dream come true,” Riley said.
Eventually, the Longhorns were forced to adapt again. Competitors offered prospects earlier, and some even hosted junior days in January, before Texas’ event. Those trends coincided with Texas’ fall from the sport’s elite.
In hopes of keeping up while still preserving its junior day tradition, Texas had a stretch in the early 2010s when it told players they were “approved for an offer” to indicate their interest until the prospect made it to a junior day. By August 2012, Texas had ditched that strategy and outright offered recruits before their junior seasons began. Within the next year, the Longhorns took commitments from sophomores and even freshmen.
Brown’s Texas tenure ended in 2013 with a 158-48 record in 16 seasons, but the Longhorns went 30-21 in his last four years.
Recruiting has changed drastically. Early evaluations are now commonplace, with sophomores and freshmen landing offers. The early signing period, in mid-December, began in 2018 and is changing again. Spring official visits have made June one of the busiest months on the recruiting calendar.
Name, image and likeness deals now play a key role in recruiting, as does the transfer portal, for which schools — including North Carolina, where Brown returned to coach in 2019 — hold scholarship spots at the end of the year.
And today’s junior days are not nearly the big deal they were in the Longhorns’ halcyon days.
“Everybody gets a junior day invite nowadays,” Kinne said. “It’s more like, ‘Hey, let’s get you on campus, see you, get to know you.’ Kind of like checking a box.”
Brown said junior days still have value as a platform for early relationship building and a precursor to an official visit. “It’s a more aggressive spring than it used to be,” Brown said.
And in a way, Brown has himself to thank for that.
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FBS Power Rankings entering spring practices favor Texas, Texas A&M
2024 Spring Power Rankings for FBS Texas programs, including the Texas Longhorns, Texas A&M Aggies, Texas Tech Red Raiders, SMU Mustangs and TCU Horned Frogs.
www.texasfootball.com
TL;DR - Craven has us 9 out of 13 schools in Texas. Behind Baylor and of course, his favorite team in the world that isn't the longhorns.
I'd say we're probably closer to 7 / 13 being realistic. I'm fine with being ranked behind *most* of the once and future Big XII, but behind ranked behind Baylor who we beat on opening weekend is a headscratcher. Of course it's Mike Craven, so he'll always try to shoehorn in his little birdies into the top rankings. "No really, this year they become the G5 playoff team! Theybelong in the Big XII and could easily place in the top half of the conference with the team they have now!"
