I disagree. I mean what do players look for? Ability to be put in the league. UW is doing it, and doing it with lower rated guys at a good rate. Education - top ten public supposedly. Location- while not my cup of tea now, it is a nice looking regional area and a fun campus if your 18-20’s. Talent is good in the area, and California is easy to pull from. To me there is no reason UW should not be top 15 year in and year out. I’m not saying I want them to be or they will ever be again, but for them to shoot for and achieve less is a failure.
I agree with your general sentiment, and note that Seattle increasingly is viewed as a major city and a place kids would want to go. I think Top 15 overstates the case a little, though. I'll pull out my old favorite, the map of the U.S. at night:
There are a shitload more lights in Texas and east of there, and more people there actually care about football and devote resources to it, too. UW is that tiny blip way up by Canada.
Even in the Pac-12, UW shouldn't consistently outrecruit USC and UCLA, at minimum. Stanford and Cal present unusual situations, especially the former, where they won't rank that high nationally, but if there is a 5-star recruit like Davis Mills (or whoever), he's almost always not choosing UW over Stanford as long as Stanford isn't a complete joke at football. Oregon has a ton of money and is cleaning up on UW now -- it's not even close -- with that likely to continue as long as the money and facilities hold up, even if Seattle and UW are better than Eugene and U of O, respectively. So UW will lose out to at least three, maybe four schools in its own conference pretty routinely. Maybe more if ASU is up and recruiting well.
And that's just the Pac-12. Referring again to the image above, most of the talent and most of the money is near all those other lights. UW will pull its fair share from California, but it's not going to outrecruit most of the SEC heavyweights. For upper midwest and midwest kids, it will have a hard time outrecruiting Ohio State (especially) and Michigan, Penn State, even Wisconsin. It's not going to pull Texas kids from A&M, UT, or Oklahoma. There are other schools that UW would lose out to, but I don't want this to be a novel. Basically, there are at least three, if not more, schools in the other Power 5 conferences that UW can't beat out, and the other P5 conferences increasingly are going in and taking what they want out of California.
Basically, I get what you're saying and I think UW should be *capable* of top-15 classes here and there, but as far as where it belongs, it's more like 20th or the low 20s on a routine basis IMO. Pretty fine distinction and I agree with your take on what their goal should be, and it's within the realm of argument either way.
