Both awards fill a huge void in the swimming world. Too often, our sport isn't presented in a way that can make any sense to your average person. For years, assistant coaches have been almost entirely anonymous. A few stuck out here and there, but usually for the fact that they had stayed in the same place for extended periods of time and had tremendous success (see Kris Kubik and Harvey Humphries). In any other year, very few people outside of their conferences would have seen or known what an awesome job Derek Perkins or Joe Hendee, this year's winners, did this year. The award gives ADs, fans and swimmers a sense of who is really well respected by their peers. It only helps.
The recruiting rankings are even more effective. When someone says they signed a top 100 football recruit, even casual fans have a sense of what that means. Having the #13 ranked recruiting class in the country means something to most everyone, even if they haven't seen a stroke of butterfly. When the men's rankings came out this year, I guarantee you most of the schools that found themselves ranked are shouting it as loud as they can. Here at Georgia Tech we found ourselves at #6, and that information was in our university's presidents hands within the hour. Why shouldn't it be?
So go ahead over to the lists and then come back to tell us what you think. Just don't make fun of Missouri State's A- ranking in the MAC. The Viking definitely thinks it should have been an A+
What interests me is the respective coaching grades given to Cal and Stanford. Clearly the top two classes, but I think most would give Stanford the higher grade. Do coaches think Cal's class has more potential? or are there other recruits not listed?
ReplyDeleteI'm assuming you are talking about women since Cal is #1. For the national rankings they gave more consideration to the top three recruits with the thought being that those would be most relevant nationally. Collegeswimming uses a scale where 1.0 is basically the perfect college recruit- any deviation from that boosts your number up. Cal's top 3 for women were 1.2, 1.2 and 1.3. Stanford was 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7.
ReplyDeleteStanford did even better than that on the men's side with a 1.0 (David Nolan) and 1.1, 1.2. Cal matched that. I think they had to go to a tiebreaker and Stanford had more depth.
No I mean in the earlier posts for each conference where the coaches were asked to grade other schools recruiting classes. Cal got an A+ while Stanford got an A.
ReplyDeleteThose rankings were based by the vote of coaches within the league and coaches were supposed to rate school's specifically for how their class would help them relative to their conference. So the Pac-10 coaches must have felt that Cal's class would be that much more helpful at the conference level.
ReplyDeleteKRIS kubik...harvie HUMPHRIES...Kris Humphries...Methinks Desantis might be subliminally professing his love for Kim Kardashian. Who can blame you though...
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