Ari Wasserman of The Athletic put out a piece about a week ago where he anonymously interviewed 15 recruiting staffers from seven conferences (including at least two staffers from each P5 conference). They talked about misconceptions, underrated recruits, preferred changes to recruiting rules, etc. Due to CG's/the paywall, I won't link the article, but I wanted to share some themes and comments I found interesting.
To start, there were two misconceptions fans have about recruiting that really stood out to me:
- A PAC-12 recruiter discussed that (contrary to fan belief) the history of a school, tradition, and anything that has happened outside of the past five years doesn't matter to recruits. I wasn't surprised by this. I don't really have any sports memories from before being a teenager, and everything I know about college football pre-2008ish is because of research I did on my own, after I developed an interest in the support. I imagine recruits are the same way.
- A Big 10 recruiter talked about how little coaches are involved, saying "Recruiters recruit, coaches coach." He discussed how recruiters do the heavy lifting, and coaches come in to close or save the day. He goes on to talk about how most coaches don't want to recruit, they just want to coach. This one kind of surprised me. I know TnT went on a (precovid) tour through the 757 to meet recruits and coaches. I'd love to know how common this is for P5 teams.
When asked about how much of their 2021 class they were unable to evaluate in person because of the COVID-19, every scout answered between 40% and 85%. This is insane to me that at 15 schools, including 10 P5 schools, at least 40% of the kids they signed they haven't seen play in person. Really hoping that our staff is as good at scouting as I think they are; I guess we'll find out in a few years.
When asked what each staffer thinks makes a great recruiting staff, there were a lot of answers, but two themes were pretty common: You have to have a clear strategy, and you have to be able to build relationships. This one concerns me. I don't know what VT's recruiting strategy is.
Comments
Good news is that we've added a bunch of recruiting staff... hopefully this helps when they can get back on the road and start building those relationships
I think a marked improvement in next years recruiting class plus at least 7 wins should be the minimum for CJF to continue into 2022. IMHO
I have done some thinking about what could bring me back onto the "keep Fuente" side of thinking:
In short, treating fans as allies instead of potential leaks/enemies and/or walking wallets. I don't need a video of Coach Fu's Fourth of July party or a Cribs-like tour of the players' dorm. Just let the players that want to show a bit of personality do so, or tell us why they like playing for VT/Coach Fuente/Corn/Tapp/whoever. It's not guaranteed to work but it's a start imo.
Shit, I don't even need the first bullet, give me bullet #2 for now, and I'll even wait a little bit on bullet #3.
Give us some open practices and scrimmages in the spring. Fans seeing guys make plays builds hype for those players and excitement going in to the next season. I still remember Facyson making some incredible plays during a scrimmage his freshman year.
I still have serious doubts there will be fans for a Spring Game and practices due to covid reasons.But if the Athletic Department had any clue of the negative closed off perception people have of the program and a little creativity, they would play the Spring Game, film it, and post it online for people to watch. Bring in former players to serve as sideline reporters.Guy makes a play on defense, he comes off the field and D-Hall or Brandon Flowers hits him up to chat about it. Sergio Render, who still lives in the area, chats up the OL talking about what their offseason workouts and goals are.You get the idea. Fuente himself and the coaches serve as narrators, basically talking up players as footage rolls of the guys making plays. Intersperse clips of the guys in their off practice time or joking among themselves in the weight room,cafeteria, whatever to add some personality to the team. It's not a full live game broadcast. It'd basically be a Spring Game summary TV episode. Maybe 30 minutes to an hour. That way, you can selectively edit in the best stuff for maximum hype value and control the message you want out there (which should be to sell the hell out of VT). You're lying to yourself if you don't believe fans would eat that stuff up. Basically, VT Hard Knocks: Spring Game edition.
Make that a double there WildTurkey. Very innovative approach to the Spring Game strategy, more spectacle, less scrimmage. A reality football show ... except that it would be reality! That would go a loooong way to improving fan/alum/former-player engagement. Very innovative marketing and CRM FuOPS plan there.
Are you a McKinsey consultant by any chance? BCG maybe? Brilliant my friend.
ACCN needs programming. That alone will likely force the spring game to be televised every year (regardless of attendance). We would have gotten 2020's game on TV, albeit on tape delay. But no reason you can't do both versions.
I'm an engineer. We're not allowed to talk to the customers. (because we'd dominate and put those other majors out of work!)
I know this might be seen as more piling on of our head whistle, but - our current FuOps aren't working...he needs to change up his operations, for sure. /S
I dont think it has to be access, but hype might be the better word. Show the fans whats going on so they are invested. It can be canned and heavily edited as long as its good.
Dan Snyder does 1 thing well, some how every off-season he makes fans believe that they made great moves when in reality they signed a 38 year old QB that throws the ball with a wet noodle for an arm. But the fans are hyped (this was more true say 10 years ago because 20 years of being let down takes a toll)
Big squat fridays were fun, show some plays, its not like teams don't know the play book, show a nice catch or a big defensive stop. Let the fans see whats going on.
My freshman year in 1993, and on through when I graduated, there was a lot of engagement of students and fans as part of what was being built. True 12th man type stuff. It was awesome to feel like a part of it all as a fan and student in the stands each home game, and at the bowl games. Virginia Tech has lost that. It's not all Fuente's fault. It's not all on him to do that. The Athletic Department at the time had all kinds of outreach to people about it, there was support and PR to build it. That kind of public program outreach isn't there anymore either, that I can see. Things are stale overall from the athletic department. The whole thing needs an overhaul that goes way beyond the coach's media policies.
The only thing that matters to me is wins. I don't care about slogans I don't care about promises and cutesy videos put on social media. I want results. Period.
Given that the decision was made to retain Fuente after 2020 combined with everyone knowing, including Whit, that with the talent coming back and the schedule, we are likely looking at around a 4 win season (if we get a few bounces), I doubt the plan is to reevaluate just a year later based on wins. Otherwise, they would have let him go this year and not wasted a year. Whit's commitment this year regardless of the motivation for the decision suggests to me that this is more than a year long commitment. Barring any shenanigans, he's going to be given an opportunity to right the ship and that doesn't happen in a year.
regarding the 2nd bullet, don't take that to mean that assistant coaches don't spend much time recruiting. They spend just as much time in their day recruiting now as they did in 2005. The main difference is that there's a group of full-time staff who are recruiting all day every day and not splitting their time to coach up the current roster. So proportionally the assistant coaches are recruiting "less" compared to the recruiting staffers, but they are still vital to overall recruiting efforts
I mean, I'm sure every program is different, but that's not at all how it was portrayed in the comment.
consider the source.. a recruiting staffer. from their perspective (recruiting is 100% of their focus all day / all night) the assistant coaches don't do as much. But also consider recruiting staffers cannot visit prospects and meet with HS and 7on7 coaches off-campus... the relationship between a player and their day to day coaches is pretty important
Coaches are the closers, lots of work to do still, but they have to be setup for success by the recruiters.
Exactly. There are tons of sales organizations that get "leads" teed up for the heavy hitters.
The story addresses this. Basically every program is breaking the "who are recruits allowed to talk to" and it sounds like the recruiting staff handles a ton more than we'd have thought. I don't want to get too paywall breaking here, and fully recommend reading the original piece.
It also directly conflicts with what players put out on social media. Everyone talks about how coach xyz texts them every day, not recruiter staff abc.
It's as if someone else sent a text for the coach from the coaches special recruiting phone.
I dispute #1 because that's the dividing line between blue blood schools and everyone else. Can you weather a post season ban like Ohio state? Can you weather a heinous act by a coach and the subsequent cover up like penn state? Can you weather a decade plus of mediocrity like Miami, Michigan, Tennessee, Texas? If what he said was true, these schools would be irrelevant l, but they are not because of their prestige from >5 years
Is it the prestige from the past or are the same things that made them relevant in the past still true today? I think it makes a difference geographically. I don't discount prestige of a name, but once you get out of blueblood status, the comment is probably more relevant.
Several of those schools have other factors going for them. Miami has the weather and the swagger. Texas is the flagship school is a state where football is a religion.
And in some cases (like perhaps Michigan), it might not be that they've done anything recently, but due to their name and long history, they are going to get more exposure. Let's say there's some poor kid who's choosing between Michigan and uva. They know that at the very least, the Michigan/OSU game is always going to be on network television, while uva just spent played an entire season exclusively on ACC Network or RSN.
Your point about Michigan vs UVA is literally the point I'm trying to make
The ACC network is going to suck the life out of Tech. We used to be the ESPN darlings with beamerball and all of our highlight plays, now we are on a network that you literally have to fight to find on the TV. Cruits don't want to see a shit show game on the ACC network, they want prime time. Only Clemson will garner primetime on most games. The rest of the ACC will be shown on this shitty, low level broadcast.
The ACC network is a shit show, and looks unprofessional. the commentators are so bad, I will not listen to the broadcast. It is not worth the effort to hear the crap they spew.
Tech will continue to suffer unless we can create buzz around the program, and we know how great Fuente is at creating buzz..... We need a snake oil salesman like Dabo to get some interest around our program.
A lot of the ACCN hate is overblown. Yeah, the announcers suck, but that's generally true of any broadcast not on ABC or the main ESPN channel. So let's not act like it's some slight specifically to ACC teams or VT.
And yeah, it sucks that ESPN is still trying to get the channel on some cable systems and that one of the big holdouts is in Virginia, so uvanus and VT games are put on ACCN as a hardball tactic. But I've had the channel from the start, and it's positioned literally next to ESPN.
Yes all announcers suck even the ones on ABC and ESPN.
But Disney cannot match the incompetence of the ACCN. Players have the wrong position in almost every game, the down and distance is routinely wrong, the camera focuses way to close to see what is going on. It seems they just want the ball carry in the screen and that is it. The production value is garbage. The commercials are even worse.
The thing about playing on ABC is that EVRYONE gets the channel. For ACCN you have to have the correct provider, which 50% of the nation only has one provider option for cable and internet. Now you could get a streaming option, but that gets expensive in addition to cable and the streaming services can drop the channel anytime they want.
I agree about the ACCN, but this line
Goes beyond the ACCN. One of the biggest problems is Cruits don't dream of playing in half empty stadiums (during normal years) against Duke, Syracuse, Pitt, Boston College, etc. They want to play in front of big stadiums under the lights against name brand teams or in big games (conf championships, playoffs). Clemson doesn't have to worry about their lackluster regular season schedule because recruits know they will be getting post season football in almost every year, and Clemson tends to have at least one interesting OOC opponent on the schedule as well.
It's easier to pitch a kid to a lower tier SEC school because they will get those experiences 4-5 times in the regular season in any given year. There are 9 SEC teams with a stadium over 76k capacity, and only one stadium under 60k capacity (Vanderbilt). For comparison, there are two ACC stadiums over 70k, and 7 stadiums under 60k. Plus we have a lot of fanbases who don't come close to filling their smaller stadiums. The UVA attendance jokes aren't based on nothing.
i firmly believe devin lee only considered us when SEC offers were not on the table. he just wanted to be able to say he played in the SEC.
i think Fuente's inability to form relationships with coaches in virginia is a big problem, but i also think a major hurdle for us is being in the ACC...right now, due to constant hype from espn, recruits want to play in the SEC, and that is more important to them than winning.
But it's not like if the ACC Network didn't exist our games would just automatically be on ESPN/ABC. There are multiple ACC games on ESPN/ACC every week. If we want to be in those games we have to be better, and earn those spots. Some of the big games will still go on the ACC Network, so they can sell the channel, but the better you are, the more prime time games you get. Alabama still plays some games on the SEC Network, and Clemson on the ACC Network, and they're doing just fine.
To be fair, there hasn't been a single VT game that wasn't on TV in South Carolina as far back as I can remember before the ACCN existed. There was maybe one game I can remember being hard to find because it was on CBSSN, which I think was VT ECU game.
Ironically, the first time I was unable to watch a VT game on TV and forced to stream it... elsewhere... was this season with the Wake Forest game. However, that wasn't because of the ACCN, it was because of the stupid ACC RSN deal and the Sinclair Broadcast Group price gouging their RSN monopoly.
Yeah, I guess if they still did those regional ESPN/ABC split games, then you might end up with the majority of games on in our region? I don't think there's any way it goes back, though.
It'll be interesting (and annoying if the rest of the cable providers don't start offering it) to see how the ACC Network progresses. Do they try to put more big games on it to force the issue with providers? Do they dial it back once everyone has it? Does it just collapse with the rest of RSNs and their high fees? Interesting times all around for the TV/streaming business, and mostly not good for the consumer.
That's what cruits want.
what about the croots
It's not the fault of the ACCN that we have become so bad lately that ABC and ESPN don't want to pick us up for a majority of their slots. 10 years ago it was rare when we were relegated to Raycom, but that's almost a weekly occurrence nowadays (with the Raycom slot now owned by ACCN), and it speaks volumes to just how much of the conference has completely passed us by in prominence and relevance.
At this point the only time we get elevated from ACCN is when our opponent is good enough to warrant it. We aren't holding up our end of the deal here and absolutely deserve the situation we are in.
I think the point is that the recruit doesn't know or care why Michigan gets more network games. The advantage those teams get from prestige of more than 5 years ago is granted to them by ESPN and other networks. So yes, the blue bloods do get to rest on their older achievements more than the rest of the schools.
Meanwhile at VT, we've reached the point where recruits only know Michael Vick either as an analyst on the Fox pre-pregame show, or as the starting QB of the All-Madden team on the video game.
So much of texting is automated these days. It may not be the head ball coach doing the texting
We need to crest a neural network recruit texting AI
At least it will be able to produce believable texts without needing to be Turing complete.
Have you been on Twitter? This bar is lowered every day.