Here come the hard facts that Smoking Gunz doesn’t want to talk about. And Gunz I don’t dispute your numbers. In fact I really like the 3.0 GPA stat. Yes, MIC is a 3 year old program, but they are not your typical startup. The program started out with D1 caliber athletes who transferred in from a Southlake Christian program that was shut down due to a scandal in the school administration. Nothing to do with the football program. However, the little ol football program of MIC ended up with a big head start in the 1A world. I don’t see an issue with that. The kids needed a place to play and they picked MIC because it was close and they could help build a program. Now here’s the issue, and I’ve brought it up multiple times but nobody wants to address the elephant in the room, MIC didn’t just build around those couple of players that came over from SLC. They went out recruiting other schools players that were involved in 7 on 7 tournaments with the aforementioned kids from SLC. Here are some facts about the MIC roster: (new = not on previous year’s roster)
- 2015 (1st year) – 3 sophomores, 11 juniors
- 2016 – 8 juniors (5 new), 17 seniors (11 new)
- 2017 – 24 juniors (10 new), 8 seniors (1 new, #3 who is a huge factor on off and def)
So what do we take away from these facts? MIC does have a winning record. But how are they getting it done? Are they developing players and doing the hard work investing in them? The numbers don’t really support that. Of the 15 freshman that were on the team in 2015 only 8 are still there as juniors, and only 2 of the 3 sophomores. So how do you get so many talented players to transfer to an upstart 1A program? I don’t know, but maybe someone should look into it. It must be the brand new stadium, and flashy uniforms. Kids love that kind of stuff.
I think the players should definitely celebrate what they’ve done on the field. They won the games fair and square. You can’t take that away. But the coaches (I’m looking at you Gunz and Rich) need to throttle back the “look what we’ve built” talk. You’ve built a house of cards dependent on you poaching players. That strategy works as long as you can keep it up. The problem is your class sizes have to keep increasing in order to get these new kids in to a charter school by the lottery system. And what do larger class sizes mean?? Uh oh, you have to start playing with the big boys. Soon you will be 1AA, and not long after that the dreaded 2A. I’ve seen the Shelby program up close. I promise you guys aren’t any where close to being ready for that. Their JV team would send you home crying in your Ferrari. The wheels fall off at that point. No kid will want to transfer into a losing program. Rethink it fellas. Do it the right way.