As you may have heard, NC State football is having a wee bit of difficulty in getting high school football players to agree to want to go to Raleigh in 2013. Here is a recap of our recruiting efforts so far:
I was curious how abnormal it is to have zero commitments in mid-April, so I examined the 2013 commitment lists for all of the BCS schools, as well as Notre Dame, BYU, TCU, and Boise State. (All data is from the Scout.com database.)
Of those 70 schools, only 12 don't have a commitment for 2013 at this point. They are listed below, with key drawbacks--proven by science--listed in parentheses.
NC State (warm milk)
Wake Forest (no sexy)
Kentucky (is Kentucky)
Arizona State (new scumbag head coach)
Oregon State (I don't know, that guy over there, probably)
Iowa State (obviously)
Washington State (disturbingly close to Idaho)
Northwestern (Princeton offense)
Purdue (insufficient mustache)
Indiana (no clue how to football)
West Virginia (dystopian char-scape)
Syracuse (tundra)
All told, there are a total of 272 commitments in Scout's database spread across the 58 schools that actually have commitments, which comes out to 4.7 per school. (It's 3.9 per school including all 70 schools.) Six schools have at least 10 commitments already and they are, as you might expect, big name programs: Texas, Georgia, Michigan, Notre Dame, Texas A&M, and Florida. Michigan has 17 commitments, with nine four-star recruits and three five-star recruits.
The rest of the ACC:
1 commitment: Maryland, Georgia Tech
2 commitments: Boston College
3 commitments: Virginia, Virginia Tech
5 commitments: Duke, Miami
6 commitments: Clemson
8 commitments: Florida State, UNC
It's disappointing that NC State hasn't been able to create much momentum on the recruiting trail despite two consecutive bowl seasons, not to mention being one win away from the ACC Championship game in 2010. Additionally, State has new and impressive (or at least competitive) football facilities, and our biggest in-state rival just went through a huge scandal. The right staff would have been able to capitalize on these circumstances, but I'm afraid we had one of the worst possible fits for the situation. I'm not saying they are bad football coaches, mind you, just that this was not the group to really get after it on the recruiting trail and use the last couple of years as a turning point.