My two cents: Tucson's isolation hurts RichRod, UA
ESPN produced a fascinating statistic during Friday’s Baylor-TCU football telecast: the average football recruit from a Power 5 conference goes 307 miles from his home to his school.
Arizona’s 24-man football recruiting class of 2015 covered an average distance of about 865 miles from his hometown to Tucson.
That’s the recruiting disadvantage every UA football coach as faced forever. The only local player in the group is Demetrius Flannigan-Fowles.
In my opinion, that’s the first reason Rich Rodriguez hasn’t publicly stated that he will return to Arizona in 2016. Recruiting is hard. Really hard. You keep your options open.
On the college football map, Tucson is an isolated setting in the old frontier. In the Pac-12, only Washington State faces similar issues.
It’s likely we’ll never know if Virginia Tech spoke to RichRod about replacing Hokies coach Frank Beamer. But if and when RichRod leaves Arizona by his choice, it won’t be much of a mystery.
As RichRod has said many times, “you’ve got to fly over a lot of good football programs to get to Tucson.”
