Back To Business: "Organized Chaos"
As NCAA dead period lifts, football recruiting goes from crawl to sprint overnight
(Photo Credit: US Football Camps)
In January of this year, the name Maurice Edwards didn’t elicit much of an emotional response in the universe of college football. In fact, very few knew anything about the junior running back who spent two nondescript high school seasons at Grayslake Central, in northwest suburban Grayslake, before transferring to Warren Township High School located in north suburban Gurnee.
When Illinois kicked off a spring football season in March, replacing the cancelled 2020 season, Edwards was sitting on one college offer, from FCS (Football Championship Series) Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, IL.
Game film is the currency of the recruiting industry and for 15 months, Edwards had nothing new to show.
“(College coaches) said the film looks good, but I didn’t have a junior season and that messes you up very bad,” Edwards said. “A lot of schools that were looking at me, they were not going to wait for me to play in the spring. If we had (a 2020 season) my recruiting would have been a lot better and easier.”
Edwards did eventually play a junior season, a truncated schedule in March and April. His updated Hudl film reveals a 6-foot, 198-pound running back with spacial athleticism and break away speed, who rushed for over 700 yards and 15 touchdowns in only six games. More offers came—from Northern Iowa, Illinois State, Central Michigan and most recently, Valparaiso.
Mostly unknown a few months ago, Edwards now sits, in late spring, in a much more leveraged position.
Rivals, a website that covers the recruiting industry, lists Edwards as the 16th best prospect in Illinois and the state’s top running back.
Edwards has reached this feat without the validation that typically accompanies such lofty status: he has no offers from Power 5 colleges.
But this month, he expects that to change when he attends exposure camps all over the Midwest. For the first time since Edwards became a three-star recruit, he’ll be watched and evaluated by college coaches there to see him live and in-person.
“What doesn’t pop out on film is that real athleticism that I have,” Edwards said. “That’s what I can show.”
The evaluation cuts both ways as Edwards, along with thousands of other recruits, are able to visit college campuses this month and make their own assessments of the college market.
After well over a year of Zooms and virtual meetings, get ready for the June invasion in college recruiting.
March 2020 will forever be timestamped and labeled as the Month When Everything Changed.
Businesses and schools, thriving hubs of commerce and social activity in cities and towns across the country, were instantly forced to close and reinvent due to the discovery and spread of the novel coronavirus.
Colleges were not excluded. A campus that happens to house a Power 5 football program is especially jam-packed in the spring, summer and fall months as classrooms, dorms, training facilities and hotels are filled with current athletes, visiting alums and future players.
But regardless of the level of football, any program’s sustainability revolves around its ability to find and procure new talent.
“Recruiting is the lifeblood of any program,” Eastern Illinois University head coach Adam Cushing said.
For 15 months, that lifeblood has been nourished through digital technology and platforms. But on June 1, football coaches once again could shake the hands (or elbow bump) the young men they hope will make up the graduating class of 2026 and beyond.
Starting Tuesday, football coaches and prospects are allowed face-to-face contact for the first time since March 2020, when college sports shut down due to Covid (in April, the NCAA Council voted to end the recruiting dead period in all sports that had been in effect for almost 15 months.)
After such a long period of idleness, coaches are now in an emotional state best described as somewhere between delirium and rapture.
“Every college coach is a little bit different, but where we’re not different is that people matter in a big way. Not having face-to-face interactions with people, that’s certainly not the way that anybody wants to go about it,” Cushing said, entering his third season at EIU. “Everybody wants to build personal relationships, so just the ability to be out and not only evaluate talent, but evaluate what type of young men that we’re wanting to get into our program has everybody back to feeling like we're moving in the direction (towards normalcy).”
Coaching football might be the least of Cushing’s job duties this month.
(Photo Credit: Chicago Now)
Here’s what Cushing has to manage this month—dozens of on-campus visits by recruits and family members, off-campus exposure camp trips by staff members and how to best utilize a new rule that allows for coaches to evaluate prospects in-person.
Adding to the hysteria is the on-campus arrival this week of the Panthers’ 2021 roster.
“Organized chaos, right?” Cushing said with a chuckle. “We’ve had a lot of time to prepare which hopefully feels like we’re going to have this plan we can track on. It’s really using a calendar to make sure everybody is all on the same page.
“The only way you struggle to do your job is if somebody doesn’t know where I am or an area coach doesn’t know where the receivers coach is and wants to bring somebody to campus that day, etcetera. If you can produce clarity for the staff from that perspective, then we can all go do our job.”
The 30-day open recruiting period this month falls into two categories for college coaches—on-campus and off-campus.
On campus, program leaders can show recruits what they have to offer both academically and athletically. Away from home turf, at exposure or prospect camps hosted by third parties, coaches can focus on the all-important evaluation process, something that for the past 15 months, they’ve done only remotely.
“Before, you had the spring evaluation period where coaches could go to schools and even watch a kid work out or observe them in gym class. That hasn’t happened,” Tim O’Halloran said, a recruiting analyst who runs the Rivals-affiliated website, edgytim.com. “It will be the first time, in a lot of cases, these coaches are physically seeing (recruits). So it’s the all-important ‘eye’ test; see what they can actually do in pads, what they look like and how they perform.”
When a popular service is taken off the market for an extended period of time, it creates pent up demand. That’s exactly what is occurring this month with football camps, as the number of eager teenagers available and ready to showcase their skills outpaces the number of available slots. For example, a three-day camp for entering 9-12 graders at North Central College in west suburban Naperville has been sold out for weeks.
O’Halloran said the return of in-person camps after at two-year layoff heightens problems that always existed in college recruiting, one of the more commonplace being unrealistic expectations by recruits and parents. The summer camp circuit can be a racket, where a buyer beware mindset can be more applicable than a presumption of discovery by a Big Ten decision-maker.
College recruiting works most efficiently when it makes use of a natural selection process that weighs heavily on sight, sound and touch and not pictures viewed though the screen of an iPad.
“A coach can evaluate film but oh boy, it’s a whole different dimension when you see it in person. It’s definitely a game-changer,” O’Halloran said, who will attend 15 to 20 camps in June. “Parents and kids look at the camp ticket as a magic bullet. Some kids will pull offers right away, some won’t. There are some I will see at every single camp and it’s just like, ‘what are you doing?’”
Recruiting uncertainty combined with the rushed June period has high school coaches worried about the physical and mental toll it could take on the rising upper classes.
After a long stretch of non-competitive time, recruits relegated to home workout videos to fill empty hours, the 120 days from the beginning of March until the end of June presents a high octane speedball of activity loaded with games, workouts and camp visits.
“There’s a lot of pressure on these kids to perform at these camps,” Loyola Academy head coach John Holecek said. “And frankly, they are not as ready as they would be in previous years.”
Holecek said he has several players in the ‘22 and ‘23 classes that have expressed interest in playing at the college level. Many of them are currently playing a spring sport while also participating in off-season weight training for the football team (the Ramblers own 2021 summer camp begins in late June.) Picking a camp to attend or what colleges to visit makes an already crowded calendar almost untenable.
The compressed mash up of events makes living in Chicagoland a major virtue, according to Holecek.
“That’s the best part of it, the living in the Chicago area that you don’t have to travel that far. If we have a prospect, he’s going to be seen,” Holecek said. “If they are not playing a spring sport it’s easy to get to these combines or the college camps.”
But the loss of a full junior season cannot be made up with a fast 40-yd dash or shuttle time at a one day combine. That fact will forever scar the class of 2022, according to Warren Township head coach Bryan McNulty.
“There were a few states playing in the spring but really, I thought, threw those (high schools) off recruiting-wise. Not that kids don’t get recruited their senior year, but it’s definitely more of a challenge,” McNulty said.
A challenge Edwards knows all too well. The Blue Devils running back understands he’s behind the eight-ball as compared to his out-of-state peers, most of whom played their 2020 season and got offers while public health orders forced him to wait.
But the lifting of the dead period couldn’t come at a better time for Edwards. A phenomenal spring season got him on the radar of Power 5 schools such as Northwestern, Iowa, and Iowa State. If he performs well on the camp circuit in June, he feels confident the offers will come his way.
“I would say something people don’t know about me from film is that I’m going to run and jump and catch really well,” Edwards said. “At the end of the month, I think I’ll have a lot of options to go to school somewhere.”
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