There's really nothing sad at all about a recruit de-committing. I think there's probably a decent correlation between the quality of the program and the number of decommits. quality programs with quality coaches and quality facilities always seem to get the players they want. If we don't want this kid going to TCU, we need to do something about it.
Do you follow SEC recruiting? Guys decommit from big SEC programs all of the time and ping pong back and forth between them. The difference between them and us is that they can go cherry pick some high level three star or low level 4 star from someone else to back fill.
And I'm not sure what you're supposed to "do about it". You can call some of these kids every week, regularly text them, visit them, watch their games, etc. However, they may still look around. If you recruit behind them on your board to protect yourself, they will start feeling suspicious and no longer "feel the love".
As a school, you protect yourself by having a deep recruiting board and constant contact with backup candidates. You never stop recruiting at a position. Once a kid decommits, you move on to the next guy on your board, committed or not. Then you move on down until you get a yes.
Where we specifically suck is that we take a kid's word for it and shut down recruiting at a position for the most part. It was very clear that we didn't have a plan whatsoever when Aaron Sharp committed to UCLA.
But to assume that we could do something massively differently with individual kids to convince them not to look somewhere else, is probably not setting the right expectation. We can probably try to communicate with them more often than we do, but if LSU or Oklahoma calls, we're probably screwed either way.
