Jerry Miller
“The Bengal” Adviser
They all look good on paper, because hope springs eternal. That’s the position Bengal football fans have now that the 2015 football recruiting class has been revealed.
The unveiling came on Feb. 4 and 5 as Idaho State University Athletic Department officials released the names of new players as official letters-of-intent streamed in.
If you look at the list of new Bengals, it’s easy to see that the coaching staff’s recruiting focus has moved to the defensive side of the ball, especially in light of the emergence of the Bengals as one of the most potent offensive machines in college football.
It’s now time to bring the defense up to the same level.
Of the 22 revealed newcomers (there could still be more), 17 are slated to play on the defensive side of the ball, eight of them are linemen, six are linebackers and three are defensive backs. And to prove that it is a “construction” project rather than just “filling some gaps”, only three of the 17 defensive recruits are junior college transfers. The other 14 are all fresh out of high school.
On the offensive side of the ball, there are only five new faces (so far), including a quarterback, a running back, two wide receivers and one offensive lineman. All are straight out of high school.
Head Coach Mike Kramer is adamant about not taking a lot of shortcuts to create football teams with strong foundations.
He’s already built Big Sky championship programs at Eastern Washington and Montana State, and he’s following the same modus operandi here, focusing on building from the ground up.
Before this year’s ISU recruiting class was announced, the Bengals had only taken 17 junior college transfers and nine from other four-year programs in four years.
Compare that to a total of 74 freshmen during the same four years.
Now lest anyone think all of these new guys are going to stick around for the duration of their eligibility, you can cast that thought aside right now. Every year there is attrition.
Some players may eventually find that ISU is not a good fit for them, others may not make the cut in the classroom, and occasionally one or two may not be a good fit “socially,” in which case Kramer pulls the handle and that player “disappears” from the program. The last scenario has seldom happened with Kramer recruits at ISU, reinforcing his assertion that he only wants “good citizens” to wear Bengal Orange and Black, but it does happen.
Kramer’s past experience at Montana State, where he was fired after some former players and an assistant coach became involved in dealing drugs has made him an easy convert to ISU’s more-stringent academic standards for athletes, which he knows is another way to preemptively separate the wheat from the chaff.
If you’re a Bengal football fan, there’s no reason not to be jacked about this recruiting class.
There will definitely be a few players in this group that will jump right out and grab your attention, like freshman wide receiver Hagen Graves did last season (by the way, this new class brings a third Graves brother to the ISU roster).
But for most of these new young faces, they’ll be plugging into the Kramer philosophy that they’ll spend about a thousand days in the program before they’ll become every-game-starters. It has worked so far, hasn’t it?
