Sorry to be a downer again  -- I guess I may be turning into FireGary 2.0 and will probably be treated like he gets treated for this post -- but this is now officially a poor start for Edsall.

Take a look at Franklin's first Vandy class:

http://rivals.yahoo.com/vanderbilt/football/recruiting/commitments/2012

It's much better rankings-wise than our early class and he's in a much worse spot to recruit -- at the redheaded stepchild SEC school. Vandy is the Duke of the SEC, and they're doing better than we are at recruiting so far, and their coach is our former OC who was incapable of landing a top-10 in-state recruit while at Maryland.

Edsall has not raised the bar on recruiting here (so far). This is worse than Friedgen's classes (so far). It's a UConn caliber class right now. That's OK if we become a better team than we've been and challenge for ACC championships, which is all that really matters, but I do think it's important to get a little perspective here. We're loading our class with under-the-radar kids who nobody else wanted yet. I had hoped we would make a run at Rivals 250 kids instead, then fall back on these ones.

I think Edsall is a good guy and a good coach. Madaras was a great get and it looks like we have a shot at Spence. So maybe things will get better from here, and maybe a few of these unranked kids really did have some qualities that all of the other hundreds and hundreds of BCS-conference recruiters out there failed to notice or appreciate, and they will turn into high-3-stars or 4-stars.

All I can say is that since the Edsall hire we got an offensive coordinator (Crowton) and a defensive coordinator (Bradford) who both come with major question marks, and now 6 or 7 of our first 9 or 10 recruits are unranked and pretty much unknown entities who signed with Maryland because we were the biggest fish to offer them, so it's probably fair to say they are question marks too.

The proof will be in the pudding. But I think it's fair to wonder right now if we're really headed in the right direction. Edsall's UConn teams succeeded, I guess, with a bunch of 2 and 3-stars, but their ceiling was 4-loss teams who could win the big east when the conference was at its all-time worst. UConn's BCS team last year would not have finished in the top-3 in the ACC. Overachieving by developing unheralded 5-year players is the UConn/Wake Forest model. I do not want that to be the Maryland model.