I have purposefully not read any posts on a football thread since the start of the Boise game. I know I would have been frustrated by many of the comments about our play, the play of Schuster, our coaching, etc. I would guess that many of the observations were "right on" while others, as usual, got carried away with petty, naive and just plain stupid comments.
I will make a few observations before concluding with the point I think we must all (those of us on ss.com, the UND athletic department and the football staff) understand and address:
I was very disappointed in our play. We certainly didn't look like one of the better FCS programs in the country.
Tommy did not have a good game. It sure appeared he lost his confidence/composure in the second half. That said, our offensive line (one of our strongest positions) did him no favors - he had very little time to do much of anything. His lack of mobility was very apparent against a team like Boise.
I sure hoped we would give Boise a good game but any expectations to win this game may not have been well-founded. Despite their 0-2 record, they have a lot of talent and seldom lose at home. If you go position by position, you could count on one hand (maybe a finger or two) the number of superior football players we had compared to Boise. They were bigger, faster and more confident than our players.
Before UND-FB-FAN gets on my case for not implying we should not expect UND to win some of these games and, if not, play a good game and gain everyone's respect for how well, how hard and how disciplined we play. I fully agree that this is what we want to our program to be and we need to get there as soon as possible.
Now my primary point.... for UND to compete at the level we all want, we need to recruit better athletes. I have been following UND recruiting very closely for many years. We continue to sign very few highly recruited prospects. For us to be successful, we need to land kids that many DI schools want. I do think that a lot of our not-highly-recruited players turn into pretty good contributors but we are not going to be a championship level team until we get more studs to decide to play ball at UND. It is too bad that Wiki is not still available. Over the last 10 years, you would see 1) most of our recruits had few, if any, other DI offers and 2) that we seldom landed kids that had offers from NDSU or SDSU.
While that is a criticism of our recruiting, we must realize that it is difficult to recruit kids to Grand Forks do its rather remote location compared to other schools we compete against. Fargo is only 75 miles from GF but, with their years of success, recruits and their families do not mind the distance. We can't do much about UND's location but another problem has been our facilities. It isn't that long ago that we had a locker room that should have been condemned 10 years earlier. The Pollard Center has been a great improvement but with a locker room across the street, a so-so weight room, etc. has not impressed kids that we need. With Phase II finally becoming a reality, it should help a great deal. No more excuses! We also need to do a better job of bringing in talented transfers - much of the above applies to transfers as well. Do we have the coaching staff to recruit better players, I guess we will find out!
Regarding Phase II, you will be hearing about a LHB&F (Let's Help Bubba & Fritz) campaign quite soon.