Drinking on the rooftop: Recruiting: Is it ok to jump recruits late and what to consider in Wilk

Hi guys. So "drinking on the rooftop", is mostly where I hope to place my bubble watches later in the season.

However until then I thought to chime in on a topic that came up once again in the Wilkinson forum:

Is it ok to jump a recruit late, and if no, until when is it ok to jump a recruit? I started wriging a post, and then realized it was gtting long for a forum post, so figured I'd put it into a blog post.

So here are my .02$:

I too am siding with those saying that it is always ok to jump a recruit. Its a completely legal choice and therefore an interesting part of the game, particularly in a crowded world. For starters, the alternative would be boring: The guys allocating money fast and early would be the only reasonable choice. Whenever there is only one reasonable way to do things, then that is bad for the game. But more specifically In Wilk 1DAA it is simply not true, that there are always similar quality players available elsewhere for less money. In Warner my recruiting is often 95% done after about 8 cycles and battles only occur for the best players. in Wilk it is usually a slow slog, meaning I also gotta plan to maybe take the recruit I need from someone late and as a consequence I allocate my money a lot more cautiously. In Wilk, a recruit I had as a backup may be attacked a bit later by someone who has lower vision and is trying to upgrade. My top recruits my not only get competition from my peers, but also come under fire late by some FBS school coach, who realizes late that he will not win enough battles at his level and downgrades to top DIAA talent. The variability of where coaches can be on the food chain is fairly big in wilk, and as a consequence coaches at all levels can have bigger disparities between what they thought they should be able to recruit and where they need to drop down and take a recruit from somebody lower on the food chain (or higher in some interesting twists). However jumping recruits late as a strategy is not without considerable risks to the guy doing it: 1) you got to leave money behind to do it later which a) creates planning uncertainty, as you don't know how much you will need and b) probably means you will not have a lot of money to create good backup plans, and as a consequence 2) often means that if this were ones base tactic there would be essentially no decent alternatives left in case it goes wrong, because they all already signed with someone else. 3) Another risk is, that some people get unreasonably angry about it and are not below stooping to colusion (which IS against the rules) to combat it. I have to say tough I have rarely seen that. 4) It only works for so long, and if other coaches are not overly prepared. If you are doing it often on a regular base, people will know what to expect, hold back money (I always try to have 10-20k left when signing day arrives, both for seizing opportunities, but also to be ready to fend off would be attackers). To me, it all comes down to the general thing about battles: If you don't like battles at all, stay at DII or DIII in Wilk, because getting jumped will happen if you are trying to cobble a top five class together in DIAA (how often kind of depends on your geographical location and density of neighbours). If you are ok with some battling, do it, but be mindful to pick your spots, accept that you cannot always have the greatest player at every position. Be aware that recruiting is unfair in the sense, that if you are already in a good position, people will not be likely to attack you, but if you are in a tough spot with your class, people will figure that you are having more spots to fill than money to protect the guys you already got, and will jump you even more often ("give to those who have, take from those who don't"). If you battle too many folks -and it may not always feel like your own choice- you'll get jumped by even more sharks who will smell blood in the water (happened to me in S129 recruiting). However, if you are not willing to seperate anybody from their would-be toy and make it yours, it will be hard to get a recruiting advantage.