How Important is Recruiting?

[southernhive]

We just fired a recruiter posing as a head coach. No thank you

No, we just fired a head cheerleader posing as a football coach.

 

[southernhive]

Then in rolled the Geoff Collins disciples. 404, ATL, recruiting, NFL, Big Time football, Elite, Waffle House, dance routines, money down, tweets, cheerleading BS, etc. We've gone 13-31, .295 win percentage, worst ever in 120 years of GT football. Why are we even debating this? We need to get our program back to where it was 4 years ago, then we can try another experiment. We don't need platers quitting during games, before the season finishes, going to other schools because the culture is rotten to the core. We don't need bush league commentators riduculing us, being a laughingstock, being pitied for being that program that used to compete, etc. Another Geoff Collins and more of this BS and there won't be D1 football on The Flats for these fly by night fans people to cry about. Collins & his ilk had their chance, time for the adults to take the program back over. If it's not readily apparant at this point, there's not much more that can be said. The handwriting is on the wall.

Agree *1000!

 

[bikeseat]

Your first mistake is thinking Geoff Collins was a recruiter. He clearly wasn't. You can have a HC that is a great recruiter that doesn't act like a dip**** (like Geoff)

It's the classic engineers bias "we can be successful if the entire company (team in this case) was technical experts. We don't need a marketing/sales department because we are so smart". That only works if our product is so absurdly compelling...and it's not. We need someone who can sell/market with technically competent staff. The idea we need some boring, technocrat who "tells it like it is" is foolish and myopic

 

[leatherneckjacket]

Your first mistake is thinking Geoff Collins was a recruiter. He clearly wasn't. You can have a HC that is a great recruiter that doesn't act like a dip**** (like Geoff)

It's the classic engineers bias "we can be successful if the entire company (team in this case) was technical experts. We don't need a marketing department". That only works if our product is so absurdly compelling...and it's not. We need someone who can sell/market with technically competent staff. The idea we need some boring, technocrat who "tells it like it is" is foolish and myopic

Name one company where the CEO excels in every aspect of the business.

No one is arguing that we do not need to recruit. We want someone who excels at building an entire program and that includes recruiting. I just do not care if he, himself, can recruit or if he hires a staff that can recruit. How is this so difficult to comprehend.

The suggestion that we are arguing for a boring technocrat or that we do not need recruiting (aka marketing) is ludicrous

 

[JacketFan137]

Your first mistake is thinking Geoff Collins was a recruiter. He clearly wasn't. You can have a HC that is a great recruiter that doesn't act like a dip**** (like Geoff)

It's the classic engineers bias "we can be successful if the entire company (team in this case) was technical experts. We don't need a marketing/sales department because we are so smart". That only works if our product is so absurdly compelling...and it's not. We need someone who can sell/market with technically competent staff. The idea we need some boring, technocrat who "tells it like it is" is foolish and myopic

it’s just a classic over correction in response to collins. he was bad and focused on recruiting so now these NPCs can’t hear about recruiting without seeing red.

we need a good recruiter as we need a lot of things. it’s crazy you can’t say that without the peanut gallery getting their panties in a bunch

 

[slugboy]

Having worked in sales for ages, the top guy does not need to be the closer and the top guy does not need to be a sales guy.

Does the Head Coach need to participate in recruiting? yes
Does it need to be his main strength? no
Do you need to have strong recruiters on staff? yes

 

[leatherneckjacket]

it’s just a classic over correction in response to collins. he was bad and focused on recruiting so now these NPCs can’t hear about recruiting without seeing red.

we need a good recruiter as we need a lot of things. it’s crazy you can’t say that without the peanut gallery getting their panties in a bunch

Again, why does the head coach need to excel at recruiting if he hires a competent staff that can recruit? You are acting like we want to stop recruiting all together.

 

[lv20gt]

Again, why does the head coach need to excel at recruiting if he hires a competent staff that can recruit? You are acting like we want to stop recruiting all together.

The head coach is the face and voice of the program whether he wants to be or not and can't largely delegate being the head recruiter away like he can with the offense or defense to the OC or DC, hence why no recruiting coordinator is thought of in anywhere near the same level of role as OC or DC.

 

[leatherneckjacket]

The head coach is the face and voice of the program whether he wants to be or not and can't largely delegate being the head recruiter away like he can with the offense or defense to the OC or DC, hence why no recruiting coordinator is thought of in anywhere near the same level of role as OC or DC.

I am sorry, but this is not true. Being the face of the program is not the same as being the head recruiter. Nick Saban delegates out recruiting duties to his assistants, including Smart when he was at Bama. Now Smart delegates to McGee and other assistants at ugag. The reason why RCs are not on par has nothing to do with head coaches being the head recruiter and more due to nature of job and experience required to staff that position.

 

[MWBATL]

If you want to talk about scheme, I like Friedgen's scheme. Figure out what the other team's weakness is and attack it. Almost every college team has at least one defensive weakness. But you must have talent that is good enough to change your strategy from week to week. So recruiting matters. But yes, so does coaching. You have to identify that weakness and what the other team is doing to cover it up--which usually leaves another weakness.

Boy do I ever agree with this statement. I don't know what to call Friedgen's scheme, but it was beautiful to watch (most of the time, anyway). Still need talent to execute it and coaching to develop that talent, as you pointed out...

 

[yeti92]

We need a sufficient recruiter, sufficient to produce winning records on the football field. Some of y'all want to act like the options are a "known" good recruiter that will pull 4 and 5 star athletes, and anyone else will only pull 2 star athletes, but that's not how it works, at all. Recruiting blue chip talent has far more to do with the school and its financial limitations these days than who's wearing the big 404 hat.

 

[EE95_curse EMAG!]

This is exactly what Mark Richt was dinged for - as a former QB and OC, he tended to focus on recruiting great skill position players. This won them a lot of games, but couldn't get them to the top. Kirby has focused on fixing this and it shows.
That said, I think class rankings still deserve a place in the overall suite of metrics for team recruiting, even more so than an individual star ranking. Team talent composite is perhaps even more useful.

Not sure Richt was ever dinged on recruiting. They had top 5 classes almost every year. They were overloaded with talent and yes, had good OL/DL talent. Richt and his hires simply were bad at planning and playcalling/gameday. End of story.

This does show that recruiting alone doesn't guarantee success. UGA perennially under-achieved and I remind my UGA fan friends/family. They allude to my jealousy of UGA football and I tell them, well, it's about time. Top 5 recruiting classes and every year, you lose (badly) the one game you were underdog and lose another game you were heavily favored...like annual clockwork. It only took you 40 years to get here. LOL.

Kirby is their first real gameday coach in decades.

So, again, recruiting is important, but the HC/OC/DC have to be competent in planning and gameday. They don't have to be superstars, but if they're bad with planning and playcalling, then all the 5-star recruits in the country would NOT get them a title. They just be a bunch of athletes running around confused with no cohesiveness, still able to make a big play every now and then, but unable to move the ball or stop the ball from being moved.

 

[cpf2001]

My concern with “the coach doesn’t have to be the head recruiter” is that I think if you take that too far, you get a coach who isn’t even qualified to judge the abilities of the staff.

Recruiters are salespeople, and if you don’t know the game well enough then it can be VERY hard to tell the good and competent salespeople from just the good talkers. This certainly appears to be what happened to Stansbury based on his comments about how Collins got the job.

 

[slugboy]

My concern with “the coach doesn’t have to be the head recruiter” is that I think if you take that too far, you get a coach who isn’t even qualified to judge the abilities of the staff.

Recruiters are salespeople, and if you don’t know the game well enough then it can be VERY hard to tell the good and competent salespeople from just the good talkers. This certainly appears to be what happened to Stansbury based on his comments about how Collins got the job.

The CEO has to be an accountant or he can’t read the books
The CEO has to be an engineer or he won’t understand the product
The CEO has to be a salesman or deals won’t close
The CEO has to be an HR specialist or the company can’t hire people

None of that is true

The Head Coach has to know talent and be able to coach his players and manage his staff. He doesn’t have to be a recruiting specialist—it doesn’t have to be his primary skill.

There are great head coaches who aren’t mainly recruiters. There are great recruiters that are awful head coaches. That’s enough evidence.

Ralph Friedgen did not like recruiting. He wasn’t anything close to a glib salesman like Mack Brown. He was a great head coach for Maryland.

Recruiting is important. It’s not everything.

 

[cpf2001]

The CEO has to be an accountant or he can’t read the books
The CEO has to be an engineer or he won’t understand the product
The CEO has to be a salesman or deals won’t close
The CEO has to be an HR specialist or the company can’t hire people

None of that is true

The Head Coach has to know talent and be able to coach his players and manage his staff. He doesn’t have to be a recruiting specialist—it doesn’t have to be his primary skill.

There are great head coaches who aren’t mainly recruiters. There are great recruiters that are awful head coaches. That’s enough evidence.

Ralph Friedgen did not like recruiting. He wasn’t anything close to a glib salesman like Mack Brown. He was a great head coach for Maryland.

Recruiting is important. It’s not everything.

I think there’s a couple key differences:

Recruiting is a huge core competency for a college football team in a way that accounting or sales or engineering or HR isn’t for any given company. So I think you’re discounting it too much there with the corporate comparison.

Another is evaluation. Evaluating an OC has more tangible results, recruiting is more of a personal and relationship thing. So I think an OC who can’t get it done but can talk a good game has fewer places to hide than a smooth-talking salesman, and less chance of fooling the head coach (Nix aside…) And I think recruiting gets especially harder the higher you go up the scale. If you’ve never seen it done at the highest levels, and if you’ve never had to compete head to head with UGA for the same players, are you going to be as well equipped to hire for that position?

Hiring bad C-suite people or VPs is a common failure mode for CEOs, and a good way to shoot your company in the foot. So just because the CEO doesn’t have to be the expert doesn’t mean he doesn’t have to know how to hire them, and that’s not something everyone is equally good at. Combine sales being a core competency for a college team and the risk of a salesperson being able to be convincing to a non-expert, and it seems risky to not have a lot of direct exposure to top-flight recruiting. Friedgen had exposure to pretty good D1 recruiting before going to MD, for instance.

 

[roadkill]

Not sure Richt was ever dinged on recruiting. They had top 5 classes almost every year. They were overloaded with talent and yes, had good OL/DL talent. Richt and his hires simply were bad at planning and playcalling/gameday. End of story.

This does show that recruiting alone doesn't guarantee success. UGA perennially under-achieved and I remind my UGA fan friends/family. They allude to my jealousy of UGA football and I tell them, well, it's about time. Top 5 recruiting classes and every year, you lose (badly) the one game you were underdog and lose another game you were heavily favored...like annual clockwork. It only took you 40 years to get here. LOL.

Kirby is their first real gameday coach in decades.

So, again, recruiting is important, but the HC/OC/DC have to be competent in planning and gameday. They don't have to be superstars, but if they're bad with planning and playcalling, then all the 5-star recruits in the country would NOT get them a title. They just be a bunch of athletes running around confused with no cohesiveness, still able to make a big play every now and then, but unable to move the ball or stop the ball from being moved.

To be clear, the folks who dinged UGA on recruiting were mostly UGA fans who complained about their inability to win the big game and also beat Bama which often stood in their way. The feeling was that they needed another bump up in recruiting to go from winning 10 games a season to winning championships. I don’t have the detailed stats, but the general feeling was their primary weaknesses were in OL/DL. Bear in mind we’re talking about going from 4 stars to five stars.

I was only able to go back to 2010 when I looked at 247 composite rankings history, but Richt’s classes were 11, 7, 9, 12, 8, and 6. No top 5’s. Smart’s have been ranked 6, 3, 1, 2, 1, 4, and 3. That’s a significant improvement considering the rarified air that they already were in.

I’m not arguing that Smart isn’t a better game-day coach than Richt, but considering he has measurably improved recruiting and also gotten an even greater commitment from the school in terms of staff salaries, etc., he has done more with more. Most years his O-lines and D-lines have generally been regarded as top five or even top 1-3.

All this just circles back to the original point I was responding to, which was that having the appropriate recruiting focus on positions of need was more important than simply looking at class rank.

 

[slugboy]

I think there’s a couple key differences:

Recruiting is a huge core competency for a college football team in a way that accounting or sales or engineering or HR isn’t for any given company. So I think you’re discounting it too much there with the corporate comparison.

That’s (1) a massive underestimation or the importance of accounting, sales, engineering, and other disciplines for a major company and (2) an underestimation of every other aspect of running a college program other than recruiting.

Another is evaluation. Evaluating an OC has more tangible results, recruiting is more of a personal and relationship thing. So I think an OC who can’t get it done but can talk a good game has fewer places to hide than a smooth-talking salesman, and less chance of fooling the head coach (Nix aside…) And I think recruiting gets especially harder the higher you go up the scale. If you’ve never seen it done at the highest levels, and if you’ve never had to compete head to head with UGA for the same players, are you going to be as well equipped to hire for that position?

Nick Saban is a weird but intensely-driven dude. He is not a personal relationship guy. Google “Nick Saban walks over player” sometime. His skill isn’t being a smooth-talking salesman (he isn’t). His skill is running a program. Same with Urban Meyer. Lincoln Riley is an offensive genius.

As far as being a smooth-talking salesman, Mark Richt is far, far ahead of Kirby Smart in that category, but Kirby has the ring.

As far as being easier to measure an OC’s tangible results vs a recruiter’s, there are websites devoted to ranking who the best recruiter is. While the class rankings and scores are junk science, people in the industry know who the good recruiters are, and they probably have a better idea who the good recruiters are than who the good OCs are.

Great salesmen hire awful salesmen all the time. Accountants can hire great salespeople. Software developers have decided that no one else can understand their industry, so companies like Google have built a huge list of technical interview questions that is completely useless for actually finding qualified developers. Most people don’t know how to screen or hire well. There’s far less correlation between being a recruiter and being able to spot and hire a recruiter than you imagine. You do not need to be able to do a job to be able to hire for a job.

Hiring bad C-suite people or VPs is a common failure mode for CEOs, and a good way to shoot your company in the foot. So just because the CEO doesn’t have to be the expert doesn’t mean he doesn’t have to know how to hire them, and that’s not something everyone is equally good at. Combine sales being a core competency for a college team and the risk of a salesperson being able to be convincing to a non-expert, and it seems risky to not have a lot of direct exposure to top-flight recruiting. Friedgen had exposure to pretty good D1 recruiting before going to MD, for instance.

There are lots of ways that CEO’s hire badly. There are lots of ways that head coaches hire bad assistants. A good head coach should hire good assistants, but that in no way means that the top guy should mainly be a recruiter.

Yes, Friedgen was exposed to recruiting. It wasn’t his specialty. FBS is populated with a lot of successful head coaches who hire people who recruit better than they do.
That’s the point. There’s proof of successful coaches who aren’t great recruiters, but they’re great head coaches. The head coach does not have to be a great recruiter to have a great team or hire great recruiters to work for him.

 

[yeti92]

To be clear, the folks who dinged UGA on recruiting were mostly UGA fans who complained about their inability to win the big game and also beat Bama which often stood in their way. The feeling was that they needed another bump up in recruiting to go from winning 10 games a season to winning championships. I don’t have the detailed stats, but the general feeling was their primary weaknesses were in OL/DL. Bear in mind we’re talking about going from 4 stars to five stars.

I was only able to go back to 2010 when I looked at 247 composite rankings history, but Richt’s classes were 11, 7, 9, 12, 8, and 6. No top 5’s. Smart’s have been ranked 6, 3, 1, 2, 1, 4, and 3. That’s a significant improvement considering the rarified air that they already were in.

I’m not arguing that Smart isn’t a better game-day coach than Richt, but considering he has measurably improved recruiting and also gotten an even greater commitment from the school in terms of staff salaries, etc., he has done more with more. Most years his O-lines and D-lines have generally been regarded as top five or even top 1-3.

All this just circles back to the original point I was responding to, which was that having the appropriate recruiting focus on positions of need was more important than simply looking at class rank.

Good thing Rivals goes back to 2002 so we can see nearly all of Richt's tenure at UGA.

2002 - 3rd
2003 - 6th
2004 - 6th
2005 - 10th
2006 - 4th
2007 - 9th
2008 - 7th
2009 - 6th
2010 - 15th
2011 - 5th
2012 - 12th
2013 - 12th
2014 - 7th
2015 - 6th

Smart has improved on Richt's already very good recruiting, but if I had to guess, he got a lot more money to do it with too. Well actually I don't need to guess, it's public knowledge UGA has been spending far more than anyone else on recruiting the last few years, but I don't think that was the case under Richt. I do remember UGA being called out in an article at one point as something like the only team in the country that had averaged a top 10 recruiting class for over a decade to not win a national championship during that span.

 

[wrmathis]

Good thing Rivals goes back to 2002 so we can see nearly all of Richt's tenure at UGA.

2002 - 3rd
2003 - 6th
2004 - 6th
2005 - 10th
2006 - 4th
2007 - 9th
2008 - 7th
2009 - 6th
2010 - 15th
2011 - 5th
2012 - 12th
2013 - 12th
2014 - 7th
2015 - 6th

Smart has improved on Richt's already very good recruiting, but if I had to guess, he got a lot more money to do it with too. Well actually I don't need to guess, it's public knowledge UGA has been spending far more than anyone else on recruiting the last few years, but I don't think that was the case under Richt. I do remember UGA being called out in an article at one point as something like the only team in the country that had averaged a top 10 recruiting class for over a decade to not win a national championship during that span.

had the same you posted typed out. will add this
Richt had an avg of 7.7. looks like he fell of more in the last half of his time at ugag. 6.4 avg in his first 7 years, 9 avg in his last 7 years

 

[roadkill]

To be clear, the folks who dinged UGA on recruiting were mostly UGA fans who complained about their inability to win the big game and also beat Bama which often stood in their way. The feeling was that they needed another bump up in recruiting to go from winning 10 games a season to winning championships. I don’t have the detailed stats, but the general feeling was their primary weaknesses were in OL/DL. Bear in mind we’re talking about going from 4 stars to five stars.

I was only able to go back to 2010 when I looked at 247 composite rankings history, but Richt’s classes were 11, 7, 9, 12, 8, and 6. No top 5’s. Smart’s have been ranked 6, 3, 1, 2, 1, 4, and 3. That’s a significant improvement considering the rarified air that they already were in.

I’m not arguing that Smart isn’t a better game-day coach than Richt, but considering he has measurably improved recruiting and also gotten an even greater commitment from the school in terms of staff salaries, etc., he has done more with more. Most years his O-lines and D-lines have generally been regarded as top five or even top 1-3.

All this just circles back to the original point I was responding to, which was that having the appropriate recruiting focus on positions of need was more important than simply looking at class rank.

And the two subsequent responses are simply looking at class rank. OK. Obviously, I am lousy at making a point.