Early Evaluation

By BJ Bennett
SouthernPigskin.com

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SouthernPigskin.com Contributor Phillip McCollum details the risk-reward scenario facing coaching staffs in regards to early evaluation in the recruiting process.

By Phillip McCollum
SouthernPigskin.com Contributor

SouthernPigskin.com Contributor Phillip McCollum details the risk-reward scenario facing coaching staffs in regards to early evaluation in the recruiting process.

The race to offer early weighs heavily on a coaching staff’s early talent evaluations.

There are two aspects to football recruiting. The one element is the one everybody talks about—convincing a recruit you want to come to your school. Equally important, however, is talent evaluation.

A couple weeks ago, Penn State got a verbal from Adrian Coxson. A thread was started on the ESPN Maryland board where people overreacted. A Maryland fan pointed out on the message board that the most significant development this year for Maryland football recruiting was not losing Adrian Coxson to PSU, though that would hurt. The biggest development wouldn’t even be whether the Terp’s get two, three or four of the state of Maryland’s Top 10 players this year.The biggest development has been that Maryland is offering recruits earlier this year.Guys who in the past would have had to attend camp or wait to have his senior film evaluated are now getting early offers.

What all this indicates is that offering early gives you an advantage with recruits. First off, you can secure a commitment from a recruit before other schools seriously get involved. And even if other schools do get involved you still have a slight advantage as one of the first to recruit and offer them. Thus, if you know you want a kid, you pull the trigger and offer. On the other hand, if your talent evaluation is off, half of your class could end up being guys with marginal D1 talent. It’s a real tradeoff for coaches. Five years ago Maryland was slow to offer prospective student athletes. Now they have more offers out than nine out of ten schools or so it seems. And this season Maryland is only bringing in a moderately sized class (20 to 23 guys).

Exactly how many offers a school has out is probably up in the air. Only a school’s coaching staff can know for sure. We can come close to knowing by simply asking D1 prospects which schools have offered them. That is what Rivals and Scout have done. It’s imperfect because the kid may report an offer he doesn’t have. On the other hand a school might have offered a couple sleepers Rivals and Scout do not know about, but overall you will get a ballpark figure of the amount of offers a school has outstanding. As of May 11, Rivals is reporting that the following ACC teams have these many offers out:

UMD - 138
FSU - 124
Duke - 108
UNC - 104
Miami - 87
Clemson - 85
Boston College - 84
NC State - 84
Wake Forest - 66
UVA - 52
VT = 51
Georgia Tech - 37

Thus the ACC teams run the gambit in how they approach early offering.

To illustrate how early offering works, take Maryland. Six guys have pledged to the school: Titus Till, Jeremiah Wilson, Sean Fitzpatrick, Ian Evans, Tyler Smith and Brice Laughlin.

It’s hard to figure out which of those would have gotten early offers in the past without camping or evaluating the prospects in person. Each guy has his own story, but my guess is that if Maryland were employing a more conservative approach only Titus Till and Tyler Smith would have received offers this early in the process. Till played on a good team that went fairly far in the Maryland high school playoffs, so the coaches were probably fairly familiar with him. Smith was one of the top five quarterback’s in the mid-atlantic region. The other four would probably not have been offered until the coaches saw them play in person if Maryland had adopted GT’s, VT’s, UVA’s or Wake Forest’s approach.

So is Maryland better off for having Wilson, Fitzpatrick, Evans, and Laughlin, all fairly under the radar prospects? Well, that comes down to one simple thing: talent evaluation. What do those guys tend to have in common? They have decent film—they must have or Maryland wouldn’t have offered. The coaching staff probably watched 30 minutes of film on them before offering. For example, articles that ran after the Evans and Laughlin verbal commitments said Maryland offered after receiving film from the prospects high school. They had never seen either of those guys play in a game in person, yet they offered. If their talent evaluation was good, they are ahead of the game. Perhaps Evans, out of New Jersey, might have been tempted by Penn State, Rutgers, or some big name Big 10 school like Michigan if he would have waited and taken some other visits. Perhaps Maryland would have been shut out. Or perhaps when people saw him in person they would have been less than impressed and passed on him. Maryland took the risk on him and got him. The same is true for Wilson and Laughlin, who, when they committed to Maryland, held only one offer and that was from the Terrapins.

In conclusion, how risky coaches are and how confident they are in their evaluation these days plays a huge roll in gathering early verbal commitments.

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