NEW ORLEANS — The sweet spot in college football recruiting is the five-hour car ride in any direction from campus. The player’s family leaves home at 6 a.m. Saturday morning, arrives at 11, tailgates and is ready for kickoff at 1, 2, 3:30, 7. It is a swell deal if you are an SEC program because you have a bountiful harvest of high school players in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee.
If you are Ohio State and factories have shut down in your neighborhood and jobs have been lost and families have relocated to the Sun Belt, the sweet spot is still Ohio and western Pennsylvania, but it is a less fertile sweet spot. Your recruiting needs wings, not wheels. You have to get into the South.
Urban Meyer and Ohio State can put some wings on their recruiting Thursday night against Alabama.
Here in the backyard of the SEC bully, the Buckeyes can get recruits in the South to look away from ‘Bama and Florida and LSU and Georgia, not to mention Florida State. The speedy guys who thought they had to showcase for the NFL in the SEC are going to look at Meyer’s spread on offense and his sub-packages on defense of 3-3-5 alignments and open the door when the Buckeyes knock.
This is a big deal Thursday night for Meyer. He won two national titles at Florida, and he is 36-3 at Ohio State, but his brand is still No. 2 to Nick Saban and Alabama. He was on that top-shelf of college football from 2006-2009, but he got bumped off by a health…
Continue Reading: Sugar Bowl Is Urban Meyer’s Audition for the Future of Ohio State Football
