BATON ROUGE — First-year LSU head football coach Nick Saban and his staff received Letters of Intent from 26 prospective student-athletes on National Signing Day Wednesday.
Quotes from Nick Saban’s Press Conference
BATON ROUGE – Following are quotes from LSU head football coach Nick Saban on the 2000 LSU football signing class. Saban made the comments at a press conference on Wednesday afternoon at the LSU Athletic Department.
“I can honestly say that I really missed this group (the media). It’s been a long time since I was standing up here and that’s the truth. We’ve traveled a many miles since then and seen a lot of things in this state. I really enjoyed some of the great things about Louisiana, especially the food and some of the home-cooked meals that I’ve had during this recruiting season. I can tell you right now that it rates number one in the country right here in Louisiana.
“We’re really excited about the players that have decided to become LSU Tigers. I would say they join a very special group of people that have a great passion for this institution and for the success of this football program. As well as a special group of people that have represented this program in the past and created the kind of tradition that we have with LSU Football. We really are excited about the future with the quality of players that we have and the quality of people that have joined us. I think we went into this with some goals that had to be re-established with the timetable we were working on. I think the number one thing that we wanted to do is get the best possible player that we could get. We didn’t concern ourselves with needs and try to get so many of one position versus another relative to what we had on our team.
“First of all we weren’t totally able to evaluate our team relative to the people we were able to to recruit. So we thought that this year was not the time to solve need but the time to get the best quality of football player we could get. Now to me that quality means character; quality people who want to get an education. People who are productive football players who want to be successful football players in college. People who have the size and speed to play at this level and this conference and be successful. So that was our number one goal in this recruiting class.
“The second thing is we wanted to get the best players in this state. I think we have outstanding high school programs in this state, outstanding coaches in this state and a lot of good players. I think it will be the key to our success if we can lock down the state of Louisiana in terms of getting the best players in attending the kind of program that we’re going to have here at LSU. The timetable this year made it difficult because some of the players have already committed and had already decided their visits. The people we were able to develop relationships with, I felt very good about their response and the success we had.
“I think the third thing we wanted to do was expand our recruiting area around the state outside of its boundaries so in the future we can take care of the kind of needs that we have by position by recruiting more by need than by area. And that’s something that we were not able to do this year, again because of the timetable. I think the timetable of recruiting has very much changed the last 15 years. I think there was a time in recruiting if you started on December 1 you weren’t that far behind in recruiting.
“In this day and age in recruiting, players start getting recruited back to their sophomore year in some cases and most certainly the outstanding players in their junior season. A lot of players have already been offered for next year. So our recruiting for next year starts today. And I think with that with that being the timetable you’re trying to develop relationships with players when they’re juniors through the fall. I think those relationships are very much developed and defined by the time December 1 rolls around.
“You’ve got two things that you are fighting. The relationships that were built prior with the people that were here as well as the relationships that other people had the opportunity to build through time. But I felt good about what we were able to do with the players we were able to establish relationships with in the short term. The players that visited LSU, I thought we had a tremendous response from. I think our players that are in the program right now did an outstanding job with the people as they visited and developing relationships with a lot of new people in this area.
“So I’m pleased in a lot of ways what we were able to accomplish in a short period of time. The success that we had with players that looked at this school was pretty good. And I think we came down to the wire with some other good players that we didn’t have a chance to get. And we made a comeback on some that were interested before that we got back in on and ended up being successful on in the end.”