Feb. 2, 2000
“First of all, I’d like to say that I really appreciate the great effortthat our assistant coaches put in. Every recruiting class is a culminationof about 12 months worth of work. The legwork behind the scenes that makestoday possible involves hundreds and hundreds of handwritten letters, phonecalls, countless hours of film study that you look at, evaluating players incamps, at high school games, and at track meets and basketball games.”
“Today we have a list of signees that we are releasing. But, thisrecruiting class is not over. We are still continuing to recruit and willcontinue to recruit possibly at least for the next couple of days andpossibly for the next couple weeks.”
“This recruiting list is an outstanding class. We look at this class as thecomplimentary class that goes with last year’s signing class. One of thestruggles that we’ve had in previous years in recruiting has been primarilyfrom the fact that we’ve been under the gun to sign certain players atcertain position because of graduation. Those years we really felt like wehad to recruit by need. This class really reflects two major things. It’sa recruiting class that reflects players at almost every major position andit’s a class that fills in the needs that we weren’t able to get last year.”
“We feel this is a class that’s filled with great, great speed. One commondenominator in all these players is great athleticism, speed and thepresence of playmakers. There are guys that are productive in many areas.”
“A real hallmark has always been that the success of our football programhas always been directly related to the domination in recruiting in SouthFlorida. Every single year our recruiting starts by looking in our ownbackyard.”
“This was really a joy in recruiting these kids because there’s a lot ofkids with great character. They were a lot of fun to be around and were alot of fun to be on campus. In the recruiting process, we rely a great dealon the input of our current players who serve as the recruits’ hosts. Whatcame back from a lot of our players about this group was that they felt thatfrom a chemistry standpoint these new players would bring a lot to ourlockeroom. So from a chemistry standpoint, we really feel good about that.”