College Football Recruitment’s Biggest Problem Is Our Definition Of It
The college football offer has become the god of the American high school football recruit — the sport’s biblical “golden bull” so-to-speak.
Yet, the concepts that are pedaled about college football recruiting are getting in the way of recruits actually enjoying their recruiting process.
I believe that all pain in college football recruiting is a simple lack of touch with reality. Happiness, therefore, would be a simple re-acquaintance with reality.
Reality though, is tricky.
Reality for me isn’t reality for you. And, as much as I might know about my experience of 5+ years in the college football recruiting game, I can’t see your life from your perspective. So, to help the only thing I or really and coach can truly offer are concepts.
Concepts, ideas and opinions can be helpful.
Concepts point us in the approximate direction of reality, but cannot themselves tell us what it is for us.
A good concept can get you in the right neighborhood, but it cannot give you the exact address for what’s ultimately going to be best for you.
The major concept pedaled by the college football recruiting industry is that if you get ranked you will get offered.
Ranking = offer.
The second major concept pedaled is that if you train with a renown private coach with connections they will get you an offer.
Connections = offer.
The last major concept peddled is that if you sign up for a recruiting service like NCSA or maybe even this that more accurate information will get you an offer.
Information = offer.
Concept vs. Gospel
The hurdle we run into with these major recruiting concepts is when they stop being concepts and start being treated as gospel by both those pedaling them and those being pedaled to. Gospel implies infallibility, or truth.
Truth, however, is something that can only be known individually.
But, to create the veneer of infallibility elementary statistical theater is performed: “98.2% of all FBS players train with us”, “voted #1 camp by parents”, or “over 99.99999% of trainees receive a college football offer to the college of their choice.”
You in your day-to-day grind have very limited bandwidth to breakdown how trustworthy the statistical theater played by the college football recruiting industry is, so I will attempt it for you.
Saying that “98.2% of all FBS players train with us” has a few marketing problems. The main problem being how does this camp define train? To have trained with this camp did a camper go to one event only or did they train one-on-one with this camp crew for years on end and thus, were a true product of their coaching expertise?
Claiming that you are “voted #1 [insert camp] in America by parents” is equally vague. Who exactly voted to make this camp number one? How many parents actually voted? How was the voting conducted? And, which parents did the voting?
Lastly, saying that 99.999% of all kids who train with you go to a college of their choice or receive an offer is equally vague. Any college football player who puts in enough effort over the course of a 4–6 month period will get an offer. There are 800+ college football programs in the country. Saying “college of their choice” is technically correct in that any college that your client chooses to go to was by their choice but it doesn’t mean it was their dream school.
In a word, there is plenty of correlation and skimpy causation in the connection between any particular college recruiting service and the results they give you.
My response to these concepts has been to come up with my own counter-concepts. You can’t play college football if you can’t get into the school academically. You can’t play big-time football unless you are a big-time talent and big-time talent doesn’t need camps to be discovered. And, you can easily become a self marketing machine and generate your own offers given consistent effort over the course of 3–6 months.
My own counter-concepts are biased in favor of my own experiences. I went to a ranking camp as a 16 year old kid and was utterly ignored by coaches for three days while they catered to only the top 5 kids at a 100+ person camp as my first kicking experience.
I didn’t grow up with Twitter being a tool in college football recruiting so I made phone calls, emailed and sometimes just showed up unannounced at a college football coach’s office to introduce myself to get recruited.
I wasn’t a big-time talent so I knew I needed to have big-time grades and oversized work ethic to compensate for the lack of recruiting attention. I also played at a micro sized 1200-student D3 school, Hartwick College, and had an awesome time.
Summing It Up
As parents reading this I think the single best thing you can do in the college recruiting process is to collect concepts from everyone you can, deploy them quickly and see whether or not you are finding them productive.
It could be you find a great ranking camp that blows your mind! Continue training with those guys. It could be you have a great local coach who indeed does have connections to the schools you like.
Ultimately, the greatest barrier to success in college football recruiting is our collectively flawed conception of what we think it is. Whatever concepts you use to guide your college football recruiting process they ultimately must be yours and no one else’s.
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