Recruiting is sales. You have a salesman (coach) selling a product (school, playing time, scholarship, etc.).
Some coaches are not as good salesmen, but they have better products, so it's easier to sell; and vice versa. There are thousands of factors that go into recruiting, but the biggest is winning.
Is there any doubt the guys we are going after and getting on campus for visits now are a higher caliber than when Paulsen started? Serious question - it seems to me they are. The more we win, the more we will be able to actually get those higher ranked kids to commit. It's like rolling a snow ball uphill with varying weather conditions.
11-21 (5-13), 20-14 (9-9), 16-17(9-9), 16-14 (10-7) I would say is steady improvement (could reasonably get to 18 wins this year), especially if you put it on a graph that includes the Virus years. Seroiusly, go back and look at how bad they were. Now we've had 2 straight years on the cusp of top 4 with limited rosters (and criticism for the composition of the roster is certainly fair game).
You can argue regression from the 20 win 2nd season, but I don't think he should be penalized for over-performing win-wise that year, mostly in part to the god that Marquise was that year.
Question is - will we win enough, soon enough, to yield the results that the fans and admin expect? And those are likely to be two very different sets of expectations. I think in general, fans and decision makers in sports are typically far too quick to jump on the "fire him" bandwagon, so I'm typically a late adopter intentionally in that regard. Especially when we are a program with relatively limited financial resources.
Disclaimer - I'm aware there is plenty to counter this post in a negative way: has had 4 years to build roster, has not recruited enough A10 caliber players, too many home losses, consistently inconsistent, etc. But that all goes back to my salesman analogy, this doesn't happen in a vacuum. Snowball. Uphill.
