Leadership Reps: Power ranking the best Butch Jones cliches
By John Buhler
3. Five-Star Hearts
“We’ve spoken about the competitive nature, and I think that’s really, really big in today’s world. Everyone gets into the whole 2-star, 3-star, 4-star, 5-star thing. The only 5-star that we even concern ourselves with is a 5-star heart. – Jones on recruitment heading into 2017 National Signing Day.
If your skin does not crawl after hearing the Five-Star Heart quote, you do not have an awkward bone in your body. You say something like that during National Signing Day and you wonder why the best recruits are choosing to play elsewhere.
It’s a defeatist attitude towards recruitment. Yes, the state of Tennessee doesn’t have as many five-star prospects as other states have like Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Texas and Louisiana, but there’s no reason to play the sorry card on something like that.
Tennessee has historically been one of the few major football programs that do a great job of recruiting nationally. The two others that come to mind are the Nebraska Cornhuskers and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. Like Tennessee, there’s not a lot of football talent in Nebraska and Indiana for those two programs to recruit in-state. You don’t see the Cornhuskers or Fighting Irish complaining about it. They get it done on the recruiting trails.
Five-Star Hearts is a cliché way of saying you value the intangible makeup of a prospective recruit. You don’t see Dan Mullen talk about five-star hearts when you hear him recruit at Mississippi State. He coaches the you know what out of his players and doesn’t make excuses for the lack of some of his players had coming out of high school.