Woodling: Mangino capitalizes on jucos
Recruit or perish. That’s the perpetual mantra of the college football coach. Either you recruit talented players or you walk the plank, take a hike, wave goodbye, prepare your resume.
In the high-powered Big 12 Conference, where bowl and television money orchestrate everything, the mantra can be amended: Recruit the junior colleges or perish.
Players from the juco ranks dot most of the Big 12 football rosters primarily because conference rules do not allow league schools to offer scholarships to nonqualifiers out of high school.
Thus, in most cases, coaches have to wait two years until those non-qualifiers graduate from junior college before they can place them in the athletic department’s heavily funded academic support systems, then put them in uniform.
In fact, for many schools, the question isn’t whether to sign junior-college players, but how many. Others, however, may find they actually have signed too many. Like Kansas University last year.
KU football coach Mark Mangino did not state flatly Wednesday he brought in too many juco transfers a year ago, but he came as close to admitting as much.
“One thing we did last year that we didn’t do this year,” Mangino said, “was we got into the last couple of weeks and took some kids that didn’t meet the profile of what we were looking for.”
Translation: We erred, but we won’t make that mistake again.
Mangino brought in 14 junior-college transfers a year ago. Five started at least one game. Two — linebacker Gabe Toomey and center Joe Vaughn — were impact players. However, six of the juco products either did not gain admission, were dismissed from the squad or departed on their own. A couple of others took redshirts and another was a reserve.
All in all, Mangino gave too many scholarships to two-year school products who were either marginal academically or carried too much baggage. In Mangino’s defense, that tactic is not unusual for a coach trying to rebuild a program quickly.
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Hear Mark: Feb. 4 signing day news conferenceMangino surely recognized the 2003 schedule was conducive to producing perhaps the six wins necessary to make the long downtrodden Jayhawks bowl-eligible for the first time in more than a decade. And there’s nothing like a bowl game to attract the attention of fans and recruits.
As it turned out, Kansas did earn a bowl trip, yet the Jayhawks did it without the help of many of those suspect juco players Mangino had been counting on.
The 2004 Kansas recruiting class contains only five juco transfers.
“It’s not the quantity,” Mangino said, “it’s the quality. All five will make an impact.”
Maybe. Maybe not. The rule of thumb is that about half of all junior-college transfers pan out. The remainder are either injured, not ready for major-college competition or troublemakers, or all three.
Still, coaches — particularly those in the Big 12 — have to take chances. You never know when you’ll come up with a gem … like a Bill Whittemore, for instance. Whittemore had an undistinguished freshman season at Tennessee-Martin, then a quality year at Fort Scott Community College, but he had injured a shoulder late in the season.
“Junior-college recruiting is rolling the dice,” Mangino said. “We rolled the dice on Whittemore. He showed up for his recruiting visit with his arm in a sling. That’s rolling the dice.”
No doubt one of the reasons Mangino overemphasized juco transfers last season was a sense of urgency to make a splash, to make some noise, to heighten awareness that Kansas did indeed have a football program.
That sense of urgency no longer exists. With a 2004 schedule that has Oklahoma and Texas instead of Baylor and Texas A&M, a bowl game is certainly possible, but not probable.
Now is the time for Mangino to concentrate on transforming the Jayhawks from a flash in the pan into a solid program capable of contending for bowl eligibility every year.
Based on his third recruiting class, that appears to be his plan.