Dick Tomey, football letter-of-intent day, 1992: “You could sign Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny and you’d find a way to say they’re going to contribute.”
Not even a Scooby could prove Tomey wrong.
Including All-American linebacker Scooby Wright’s final season at Arizona, 2015, Arizona has the second-worst active seven-year conference record, 16-43, in the Pac-12. Why? Too many Bugs Bunnies and Daffy Ducks on letter-of-intent day.
Yet that didn’t stop UA coaches Rich Rodriguez and Kevin Sumlin from annually sitting behind a microphone on letter-of-intent-day and saying “we addressed our needs” or something similar.
Addressing isn’t the same as evaluation, performance and development.
For the last seven years, Arizona has whiffed on letter-of-intent day. It has recruited with unprecedented ineffectiveness. The combined Rivals.com recruiting rankings of the last seven years reflect how the Wildcats have fallen from the Pac-12’s middle class to the second-worst conference record over the same period — only Oregon State (15-46) is below UA.
Here are the composite Rivals.com recruiting rankings of that seven-year stretch:
Utah, 27th place
ASU, 38th place
Cal, 41st place
Arizona, 57th place
That suggests Arizona has recruited better than just eight Power 5 schools since it won the Pac-12 South championship in 2014. Too many Daffy Ducks. Not enough Trung Canidates.
Now comes word that Jedd Fisch’s first UA recruiting class is ranked No. 35 by 247Sports.com and No. 37 by Rivals.com heading into Wednesday’s start of the early signing period. That’s better than Utah and UCLA. It’s more highly-rated than Iowa and Wisconsin.
It’s finally about the Jimmys and Joes more than the X’s and O’s.
From the day Fisch was hired a year ago, it wasn’t about his coaching acumen and pedigree as much as it was about his positivity, personality and ability to be a relentless recruiter.
Fisch’s predecessors — Rodriguez, Sumlin, Mike Stoops and John Mackovic — had superior coaching résumés’ than Fisch. But with the exception of Stoops’ 2005 and 2006 classes — think Spencer Larsen, Eben Britton, Willie Tuitama, Earl Mitchell, Brooks Reed and Ricky Elmore — the personalities of Mackovic, Stoops, Rodriguez and Sumlin did not translate in recruiting.
Fisch reminds me of Minnesota coach P.J. Fleck, who doesn’t have the sideline presence of a Kyle Whittingham or a Nick Saban, but in the last two full seasons has coached the perennially average (or below) Golden Gophers to 11-2 and 8-4 records. In the last five years, Minnesota has ranked a composite No. 39 in Rivals.com recruiting rankings.
That’s 16 spots higher than Arizona. That’s the difference between bowl games and last place in the Pac-12 South.
If you research Arizona’s 43-year history in the Pac-12, it all adds up. The single best recruiting year of the four decades was the Class of 1980. It led to the school’s most successful five-year record — 37-17-3 — across that period. The Wildcats were serious Rose Bowl contenders in 1985 and 1986; they were ranked No. 3 entering the 1983 season; and they beat No. 1 USC in 1981 and undefeated Notre Dame in 1982.
They twice knocked ASU out of the Rose Bowl.
You can trace all of those achievements to the Class of 1980, and to a significant extent, the Classes of 1981 and 1982. It’s almost headshaking to sit back now and realize that Arizona recruited better immediately after it moved up from the WAC to the Pac-10 that it has the last 20 years.
It requires a bit of an explanation.
The Class of ‘80 was put together by coach Tony Mason, who was fired about six weeks after letter-of-intent day for what turned out to be the most colossal NCAA investigation and punishment in the history of UA sports.
Whether that success was tied to allegations of slush funds and illegal recruiting will never fully be known, but Mason’s Class of 1980 had what I call 19 “hits.”
That means 19 recruits were successful and strong contributors. In most years, schools not named Alabama or Ohio State average close to a 40% success rate on signing day. But that Class of ’80 hit it out of the park.
It included consensus All-American Ricky Hunley of Virginia, future NFL players Phil Freeman, Brad Anderson and Randy Robbins, All-Pac-10 performers David Wood, four-year starting QB Tom Tunnicliffe and others such as superior punter Sergio Vega, multi-year starting linemen Frank Kalil, Ivan Lesnick and Marsharne Graves.
Larry Smith was an exceptional recruiter during his time as Arizona's head coach.
The Class of ’81 had 12 hits, also above average. It included future NFL players Mark Walczak, Vance Johnson and Lamonte Hunley, and big-game performers like Jay Dobyns, Julius Holt, Steve Boadway, Joe Drake and tight end Mark Keel, the top tight end at Arizona until Rob Gronkowski showed up 25 years later.
Coach Larry Smith and his recruiting chief, Gary Bernardi, were just as successful in ’82, scoring 13 hits — including future NFL players David Adams, Allan Durden, John Kaiser, Max Zendejas and Byron Evans and high-level Pac-10 players like Jon Horton, Brent Wood and three-year starting QB Alfred Jenkins.
Smith gets a ton of credit, and deservedly so, for surrounding himself with one of the best coaching staffs in school history, men like Moe Ankney, Tom Roggeman, Steve Axman, Mike Barry, Chuck Stobart, Bobby April and Marc Lunsford.
But looking back all these years later, what they may have done best was recruit. No wonder USC hired Smith away from Arizona in 1987.
Yes, Tomey’s “Desert Swarm” years followed a similar recruit-first, coach-later formula. According to my evaluations and research, Tomey’s Class of 1990 was the second best, or perhaps No. 1A, of the last 43 years. It had 16 “hits.”
The Class of ’90 included future NFL players Chuck Levy, Tony Bouie, Sean Harris, Steve McLaughlin, Mike Scurlock, Rob Waldrop and Josh Miller. That’s seven NFL players in one class. It also included rock-solid multi-year starters such as Pulu Poumele, Mu Tagoai, Terry Vaughn, Richard Maddox and Mike Heemsbergen.
No Daffy Ducks and Bugs Bunnies in that group. Just a lot of high-quality Jimmys and Joes.
