Can lightning strike twice for Indiana?
Josh Pate slots the Hoosiers seventh in his rankings of the top ten programs over the next five years -- acknowledging he was wrong about them last year but questioning whether their portal-driven formula can sustain success.
Video Transcript
I've got Indiana at number seven.
Over the next five years, it still feels so new to me.
Like, I made a career out of doubting Indiana last year for all the wrong reasons, and I acknowledge that, and I owned that.
Will they be able to continue to recapture that magic and that form for the next five years?
That is really hard to do.
Really hard to do.
And what was really crazy about it is if you look at the graphic we have on the screen right now, those are Indiana's recruiting rankings, just straight high school classes.
And the last five classes leading into winning a national title last year were 47th, 29th, 59th, 60th, and 53rd.
Now, I know that you're sitting there screaming, "Well, yeah, Josh, that's not the story, though.
The story was Sig came from JMU, and he brought a bunch of guys with him via the portal."
I know.
I watched every game just like you guys did.
I was wrong on a lot of them, but I watched them just like you guys did.
I'm intimately familiar with their roster.
That begs the question, now that a lot of those guys cycle out of the program, they've portaled some more in.
Jesse, they have the number one portal class?
Okay.
It was a smaller class, but they portaled guys back in.
Is that the formula every year, or does the proof of performance now, does that transition to where they recruit high school at a much higher level?
My, my point is, does the talent acquisition mechanism put a product on the field that is the same caliber that it was last year?
The answer is it may be better.
Or there's a third component here.
There's a third possibility.
Maybe it's better in terms of raw talent, but maybe that magic's not recreated.
Or maybe Kurt Cignetti's a wizard, and I should have put him number one and not overthought the room.
Staff churn is the other thing I wonder about with them.
Right now, I mean, that OCDC combo, that head coach OCDC combo is lethal, and you normally don't keep them together like this for that long, but you especially don't normally win a national title and keep them together.
And Kurt Cignetti has done that.
Cignetti.
We gotta work on the pronunciation.
Clemson and Cignetti.
I've gotta work on both of those
