Washington State Football FanSpeak: Difference In This Cougar Class is Where it Begins

Sep 14, 2012; Las Vegas, NV, USA; Washington State Cougars wide receiver Gabe Marks (84) points to the sky after scoring a touchdown during the second quarter against the UNLV Rebels at Sam Boyd Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jake Roth-USA TODAY Sports

Kyle Rancourt of CougCenter.com was tweeting some interesting things yesterday about the Washington State recruiting class, getting us to thinking about the value of what we signed just a couple days ago.

The Cougar 2013 class, going strictly off of Scouts star value, was the best in the history of the school at 2.82 stars per player. It’s good for only 49th in the Country, but if you take into consideration everybody on the commit list for each school (4 others have reportedly signed grayshirt letters for the Cougs) WSU jumps all the way up to 37th and 8th in the Pac-12.

The star value falls to 2.71, but bottom line is that this is the best class by the numbers at WSU in a very long time, if not ever. We’ll have to see if that transfers to the field, but it’s highly thought among the Cougar faithful that this is the best looking class they’ve seen coming out of high school in 10 years.

The 2001 and 2002 classes accomplished the most, helping the Cougs to their best 3 season run in program history, with 10 wins in each year from 2002-2004. Those wins included a Pac-10 Championship with a trip to the Rose Bowl and victories in both the Sun and Holiday Bowls.

There were also some pretty solid classes in the 90’s, in terms of accomplishment and pure talent. With that in mind, these guys have huge history to live up to, and coming off of the worst 5 years run in program history, including 3-9 last season. It might be an even bigger challenge when you consider that several other teams in the conference had better looking classes then they’ve had in a while as well.

Regardless, Rancourt mentions something about this class that we haven’t seen in a while:

What Kyle’s saying is that the Cougar class starts with more talent than previous classes. While Wulff and Co. recruited plenty of potential, they couldn’t get the players that already have the talent to compete in this conference. The players this years weren’t the top of the bottom, they were the bottom of the top. In some cases like Tyler Bruggman, Paulo Lepua and Daquawn Brown, they were even in the mix as some of the best the country has to offer.

Leach still looks for talent with potential, and the sky is the limit for some of these kids, while others have a definite ceiling but enough raw talent already to be early difference makers. Most of these kids not only come from winning high school programs, they also had many offers from other major BCS programs. That’s an important contrast to consider when judging their potential.

On the other hand, Kyle also cautions not to get too high on it:

I will say that this class is not the best the Cougars can do. Like Kyle I don’t want to say that this is the class that changes Cougar football. However  I think this class contributes to that in a big way. I believe 2010-2014’s classes will have a combined effort in really turning around the program and winning football games on a consistent basis. Unlike Kyle however, I am a believer that (assuming the Cougs start winning as is presumed) 2015’s class is the one that begins a whole new era of Cougar recruiting and consistent championship level football once again on the Palouse.