The first of two national signing days for high-school football players has come and gone, and once again we’re reminded of the importance of college football recruiting.
Each year, it seems, college football coaches are under ever more scrutiny for their ability to recruit – or not. Jimmy Lake’s lackluster 2021 and 2022 recruiting classes – especially his failure to keep high-profile, in-state recruits home – is one of the reasons he was fired as coach at Washington. Contrast that to the highly-ranked classes maniacal recruiter Mario Cristibal put together at Oregon, and you know why the University of Miami was willing to back up the Brinks truck for the Hurricane alum to spread some of that recruiting magic around south Florida.
A couple months ago, Georgia coach Kirby Smart said something very interesting in his postgame press conference after his Bulldogs had destroyed rival Florida.
“If you don’t recruit, there’s no coach out there that can out-coach recruiting,” he said. “I don’t care who you are. The best coach to ever play the game better be a good recruiter because no coaching is going to out-coach players. Anybody will tell you that our defense is good because we have good players.
The coach he had beaten, Dan Mullen, deflected a question about recruiting a couple days later in his Monday press conference.
“We’re in the season now,” Mullen said to the reporter. “We’ll do recruiting after the season – when it gets to recruiting time we can talk about recruiting.”
Wrong answer. Hate to inform of you of this, coach, but recruiting, one of the staples of any major college program, is now a year-round sport. It’s been said that Cristibal and his Oregon staff were more often on their phones and laptops during the season with recruits than they were on the field with their players. Florida fired Mullen a couple weeks after its game with Georgia – largely for subpar recruiting.
Naysayers of recruiting will say it’s a crap shoot, an inexact science, and more about “developing players” than attracting plug-and-play stars. Lake said he took pride in taking “three-star” recruits and turning them into “five-star” talent. That may have been true in his position of expertise – the defensive backfield, which he groomed several players for the NFL – but that philosophy didn’t translate to the rest of the team.
Let’s face it, superior talent often trumps coaching strategy. As they say, it’s more about the Jimmys and the Joes than the Xs and the Os.
I didn’t get the significance of recruiting until the early 1980s, when I was a young sportswriter for The News-Review in Roseburg, Oregon. But a glimpse of a Sunday Sports cover of The Eugene Register-Guard got my attention.
The paper in January 1982 ran a large photo of the most coveted high-school running back in the nation sitting in the stands at snow-blanketed Autzen Stadium. Kevin Willhite, who had rushed for a California prep-record 4,901 yards and 72 touchdowns for the Sacramento-area high school of Rancho Cordova, was on a recruiting visit to the University of Oregon. I had never seen anything like that before. And apparently, neither had the NCAA. The photo taken by a R-G photographer resulted in the U of O being slapped with a NCAA infraction (but that’s another story).
The Register-Guard at the time was a pioneer in recruiting coverage. The paper’s sports reporters, and its sports editor at the time, Blaine Newnham, often wrote about prospective Duck recruits. Further south, the Long Beach (California) Press-Telegram was beginning to publish its popular “Best in the West” list of top high-school football and basketball players during the recruiting season.
Before that photo of Willhite, I’m not sure I had given much thought how much time college football coaches spent time stocking their rosters. As a follower of University of Washington football in my youth, the only recruiting news I was aware of was that school boosters paid money to entice California high-school star Hugh McElhenny in the 1950s to enroll at UW. The story was the under-the-table dough was so good that when the Huskies’ All-American went to the NFL he actually took a paycut.
National Signing Day before the 1980s was not a big deal. I’m guessing the signees for UW and WSU were listed on the “agate page.” For non-journalists, that’s the “small type” scores and results page usually reserved in the back of a Sports section. You don’t see full-blown “agate pages” anymore, but again that’s another story.
Recruiting was becoming a bigger deal by the mid-80s, when I joined the Sports department at The Seattle Times. We started our own “blue chip, red chip and white chip” lists of the state’s top high-school football players. It was usually published in January, just before National Signing Day, always the first Wednesday in February. The “chips list” package was a big hit with our readers.
Later in my career at The Times, when I was assistant sports editor, I was a big advocate of recruiting coverage. I remember lobbying my boss, sports editor Cathy Henkel, for a minimum of 6-8 pages to cover the news of Signing Day in February. I believe – and still do – that the process of identifying and evaluating high-school talent is fascinating. It’s not just the ability to pinpoint that talent, but to project what that talent could look like 3-4 years down the road, that interested me.
Even so, in my wildest dreams, I couldn’t imagine where we are today. Recruiting fans gladly pay subscription fees to web sites that only disseminate recruiting news. And the insatiable appetite for recruiting coverage has gained steam over the past decade.
With heightened interest in recruiting, there has come an uptick in recruiting resources at colleges.
As recent as 2003, when Rick Neuheisel was coach at Washington, the Huskies’ recruiting staff consisted of assistant coach Chuck Heater and a secretary. And Heater was also the Huskies’ running backs coach, so he wasn’t even recruiting coordinator full-time.
Today, Washington and other Pac-12 schools have anywhere between three and five full-time recruiting staff. It was no surprise that one of Kalen DeBoer’s first moves as head coach at Washington was to lure super recruiter Courtney Morgan from Michigan as UW’s recruiting coordinator.
As much as the Pac-12 has beefed up its recruiting emphasis, however, it pales in comparison to the South. SEC schools, for example, each employ between 15-20 full-time recruiting staff. It’s no wonder schools like Alabama, Georgia and LSU are not only the biggest winners in the recruiting wars, but also regulars in the national college football playoffs.
Smart is the coach of one of those recruiting-obsessed schools. As the head Bulldog, he says he spends 25 percent time of his coaching, 25 percent evaluating talent and 50 percent recruiting. That’s 75 percent of time spent on recruiting.
Will there come a time when the head coach is only a coach in name only? Will he essentially be a pitchman, a full-time recruiter of talent?
The pressure to win at big-time college football programs is immense. And it’s why the coaches with the biggest recruiting chops are in the most demand. Queue up Lincoln Riley, who will be paid $10 million annually to revive USC.
Of course, when it comes to recruiting, there are no guarantees.
Remember Kevin Willhite, the No. 1 running back who posed in the snow at Autzen? After verbally committing to Washington three weeks before Signing Day in ’82, he shocked the college football world by signing with Oregon.
But the heavily-recruited Duck never fulfilled the promise that made him a Parade Magazine All-American in high school. He tore his hamstring during his senior high-school track season, and then suffered further injuries at Oregon.
Willhite was eventually switched to fullback. In other words, he essentially ended his time in Eugene as a blocking back.
The Inside Scoop 