Good points all around...Of course, when it comes to "recruiting in our own backyard", the problems that arise include but go beyond the ones that you mention, E-. We won't get everyone we want--in fact, with so MUCH talent in-state we CAN'T: we have to balance going after the very best with making damn sure we fill our "positions-of-need", and that's just the START of the subtleties of the year-round struggle. It is in THESE areas that Meyer is whipping his "Big ?"-counterparts--to the point NOW that he feels he is far enough out-in-front to begin admonishing (read "taunting", or at least "lecturing from on high"--confident to-the-point-of arrogance, if you think about it, that's how it's BOUND to be taken by the other conference-coaches) them to "do better", advising them that "it's an all-year job nowadays"...He has a point, though--and it is amazing (in a negative, almost bewildering way) that this even needed to be SAID to his colleagues, which to a certain extent, it DOES!
Since it is a given, with so much talent down here, that some good ones will annually be "lost" to programs in other major conferences, including the higher-profile schools up north, it is in ours and EVERYONE'S interest that they be "spread around" up there--the Michigans, MSUs, even Illinois, Purdues, PSUs and so on HAVE to start doing things in the Twenty-First century as the SEC teams have done it since decades back in the mid-TWENTIETH. They're gonna have to recruit hard everywhere, all year long...They fell behind as-a-conference with this "gentlemen's agreement" among themselves for all those years: NOW they're getting buried by a guy who learned to do things the SEC-Way--and if they don't watch it, they'll be stuck in that hole for years to come--and the rest of us (ie. at least two SEC-teams, plus the one team they try to put forward from elsewhere) eventually find ourselves annually facing in the coming "4-Team Play-Off" a tOSU team that's stocked with pretty fair talent, having sliced thru' the rest of that conference each year ON-the-field in games as easily as they are now beating them OFF-the-field in recruiting.
Beating the representative of "the Big Slow Ten" each year in a BSC game was fun while it lasted, but once this imbalance I speak of began to develop up there, it became more and more in EVERYONE'S best interests for the rest of that Conference to begin getting better, faster (as in "Big AND Fast") players from the pool available down our way, a pool that, with the limits in numbers-of-scholarships everyone now faces and the still-growing huge NUMBERS of skilled players becoming available each year, we can't POSSIBLY exhaust on our own--and therefore, as I say, it is by now in OUR best interest as well as THEIRS that ALL of them recruit more determinedly and effectively in the future.
With our Head Coach and the staff of talented, hard-working true-believers continuing to do what we can already SEE they do as-well-as ANYONE, any staff OUT THERE, we'll continue to get MORE than "our share", I am pretty damn confident of that. However, there are these other forces at work out there, swirling action-and-reaction that involve the interplay of forces whose ultimate consequences are difficult to fully envision. WE CAN gather GLIMPSES of specific areas-of-future-concern, though, and it seems clear that the current trend might well concentrate too many of "the ones that WILL get away" in one place.
