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y$7 Football Recruits: Only Time Will Tell
Sharpless Says Check Back In Four Years
Opinions. Like the nose on your face, everybody has one.
They can be helpful or they can be truly inaccurate and not to mention have no meaning of any kind. So when someone tells me that Kentucky suffered a horrible recruiting class, that UK's program will take a nose dive because Frank Jacobs, Jeff Ellis and Eddie Thomas are going elsewhere, and that the Wildcats are headed nowhere I say, "Ask me the same question in a couple of years, or at some other stop down the road."
Incidentally, my suggestion to you is to contact Kentucky assis-mt Rod Sharpless and see what he has to say.
Nick Nicholas
Cats' Pause Columnist
"People always are looking at recruiting services," said Sharpless last week. "It might say that Notre Dame had a great year or Pitt or Florida had a great year. That's true on paperwe all have great years. . .potentially. But the final analysis is in four or five years. (We look at) what has that class contributed to that program?
"If we didn't have confidence in the players we recruited we wouldn't have given them a scholarship."
A strong foundation is what keeps a program going. It's the recruiting class which continuously fuels the program. And while an incoming class may be valued at a premium, what's important in the end is how much mileage a coaching staff can get out of a paticular crop.
"On paper we feel comfortable with the size, weight, strength and their accomplishments in high school," added Sharpless. "We don't know (how good they are) yet. We won't know until we get them here and line them up against some of the players already here and see how they'll progress in four or five years from now.
"Of course, I can say they look great on paper. But how many paper football players have won football games?"
Overall, would you consider UK's newest group good but not great?
"Check with me in about four years from today, Nick and I'll give you an answer," Sharpless replied. Onward to next season and what lies ahead. Sharpless, supervisor at the defensive tackle station, believes the Kentucky program is gradually building and building its way upward. What the Wildcat coaching staff is looking for in the long run is experience and continuity.
Hoping that a couple of freshmen can come in and add a couple of Ws is a nice thought, but not likely. With each season Sharpless believes UK's program is building a stronger foundation. Every player on last year's roster could be listed as a Claiborne recruit. The Big Blue pyramid, although slowly being developed, is being built.
Looking at the season-ending depth chart you'll see plenty of first-year and redshirt freshmen performers as third-, fourth- and even fifth-stringers. Players like Randy Holleran, Donnie Gardner, Carlos Phillips, Chuck Broughton, Darren Billberry and others, however, will soon get their chance to show why they were recruited by UK. It may be next season, or the following season. We'll just have to wait.
Development takes time. Mark Higgs, Dee Smith or Joe Worley were able to leap from the high school level and into the SEC without landing on their derriers. Despite what you may have heard in the past, though, not all kittens land on their feet.
"Our number one concern was strengthening up the position at tight end," Sharpless said. "Injuries last year (Matt Lucas and Joe Curry) kinda weakened the position. We had to put some young and inexperienced players in. Of course, we like to bring the younger players in gradually and eventually give them a chance when they're feeling comfortable of playing an SEC schedule."
If you check out the nation's best programs you'll find that many teams mainly rely on experience as their forte. At Kentucky, where football is not as popular as it is in Tuscaloosa, Baton Rouge, Gainesville, Athens, Auburn, or Knoxville, Claiborne has started many young men who might not have been ready for a first-team assignment.
Having a defensive and offensive unit dominated with mostly five-year players is what Kentucky is striving for. Sharpless says that's the goal for UK's football program.
"If you can bring a class in, say in '87, and keep that class intact
for four or five years," Sharpless said, "then it's going to build and enhance your program. Sometimes you have to break those units down and put the players where you need help immediately.
"As long as you can keep a class intact. . .it improves your program for potential growth and development."
Slowly but surely the UK program is building. And with its recent off-the-field achievementsleading the SEC for the third straight season in regards to academic all-conference candidates, and adding a new training facilitymore and more outstanding prospects will consider the 'Cats their No. 1 choice.
The only problem slowing Kentucky down is that the Wildcats are a member of the SEC, arguably the nation's finest gridiron conference. For Claiborne and his staff, whose record at Kentucky is
Sharpless: 'Paper Players Don't Cut It'
25-29-2, they may never again experience a season like the 9-3 campaign in 1984. You see, while UK is making gains, so are the SEC's elites.
The early reports are in and Florida, Georgia and Tennessee had what many experts consider banner recruiting years. The bottom line? Claiborne and his staff are making progress but so are their foes, which makes the current task at hand a very difficult one.
You might not have known this but right now the Kentucky players are about to enter the "second quarter."
"We have what we call the 'four quarters,' " Sharpless indicated about the 'Cats' year-round schedule. "Our winter program is our first quarter, the spring is our second quarter. Of course, the summer is our third quarter and the fourth is the fall."
Spring practice is just around the corner. On March 25, Kentucky will begin its spring session and work toward the annual Blue-White game at Commonwealth Stadium (April 25).
"We feel that in spring practice everybody has to earn a position," he said. "We want it to be competitive and we want to put the best 11 guys on offense and defense on the field.
"If you can have a positive experience from winter to spring to summer then it's also going to carry over to that fourth quarter, the quarter which people evaluate. They're not evaluated from January to August, they're evaluated on Saturdays at 4:05if we won or lost."
As far as going into spring with a different approach, Sharpless said the team objectives will remain the same as they have in the past.
"We're going into the spring with the same objectivetrying to find where our best football players are and getting them into posi
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Oscar Combs
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for Walter Byers' big chair in Shawnee Mission, Kan.? There are two schools of thought. One has the new commissioner as the odds: on favorite to replace Byers. Without question, Dr. Schiller is qualified for either post and possesses the qualities needed to turn either the SEC or NCAA in the right direction for the 1990s. The other theory has it that Dr. Schiller's name is being mentioned prominently with NCAA because of his participation at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, but that he really isn't interested and intends to be the force behind the SEC in the years ahead.
(E) And last but not least, who will capture the event which everyone is supposed to be in Atlanta for next week? Will Bama be only the second school in the past 10 years to win both the regular season and the tournament title? Only Kentucky has performed the trick since the tourney was revived in 1979 and the Wildcats worked the magic twice, in 1984 and again last season. Alabama is handling the league much like Kentucky did a year ago and UK won the SEC tourney. But the Wildcats had to fight for their life in the semifinals and finals and they were played in Rupp Arena.
My crystal ball says don't look for the Crimson Tide to win the title, unless they meet Kentucky in the championship. Then, the Tide would get sweet revenge after a six-game losing streak which goes back January of 1985. If those two meet, the Tide will win. After the seedings are made, we'll give you our final pick next week.
HITS AND MISSES ... As noted above, don't be shocked if teams like Kentucky. Louisville. Georgia Tech and
LSU are invited to the NCAAs. Louisville is the defending national champion and it has Pervls Ellison while Georgia Tech has Tommy Hammond and LSU has Dale Brown. What would a tournament be without a preacher for the invocation .. . And speaking of our good friend Brown, could you believe bis on-air criticism of officiating during the LSU-Kentucky game on national television last Saturday? Dale is a good friend of mine, but one has to wonder if enough isn't enough in the deals of "miking" coaches, especially when the game is in progress. I'd be interested in knowing if Dr. Schiller had the opportunity to view the game via NBC-TV. Even more interesting would be learning what Dr. Schiller's reaction was . . . Congratulations to new LSU athletics director Joe Dean, the former czar of the Converse athletic shoe manufacturer, who has traded in his sneakers for the bizzare world of administering college athletics in the zany atmosphere of Louisiana politics. Good luck, Joe, and our sympathy . . . Hey, Joe, did you see a tape of the Kentucky-LSU game? Whatta ya think? . . . Coaches around the SEC are upset because ESPN got shut out of SEC basketball games this winter and they plan to make a push to get the games back on the network next season according to one good source. The shutout came when Lorimar Productions, which had the SEC rights before it turned bottoms up, screwed up according to one observer. ESPN thought all along it had rights for another year, but when Jefferson-Pilot, the new rights holder, came aboard, they cut a deal with the USA Network. Reports are that the situation is in legal hands right now. Meanwhile, the coaches are fuming that there is no SEC action on ESPN . . . My, what a strange season it has been. Kentucky could wind up as low as the second division this weekend, yet the Wildcats are 3-1 against the league's top two teams, including the only wins over conference champ Alabama. On the other hand, Kentucky is only 2-5 against the No. 5, 6, 7 and 8 teams.