I didn’t get to watch Mack Brown’s press conference yesterday, but they do have the transcript up at TexasSports.
It’s really good. Surprisingly good for those of us who are accustomed to Mack speak. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of Mack speak. But he gave insight into our recruiting process that I don’t remember reading before.
Some people have asked about how we recruit and what we do. So you will know, each coach on our staff has an area he recruits, and he goes out and finds the player. For example, Mike Tolleson has the Fort Worth area. So, he found Reggie Wilson and Darius White. Bruce Chambers has parts of Dallas. Bobby Kennedy has the other parts of Dallas. Bruce found Mike Davis, and Bobby Kennedy found Jackson Jeffcoat.
Some people might object to his use of the word ‘found,’ but he’s not using it in the sense that Texas was the first school to discover these players.
Then, they bring the video back to the position coach. If the position coach likes the young man enough we get a transcript on every young man.
So the position coach is the gatekeeper. If he doesn’t like you, you’re out of luck at least initially. I’m pretty sure this is not a hard and fast rule though. If I discover say Vince Young, but Greg Davis doesn’t like him I’m still going to recruit the guy. Not that this happened or anything. There are ways to circumvent an established work flow in any organization.
It goes to Brian Davis.
Ugh. Hopefully then a competent underling gets it.
It goes to our admissions office. They give us a yes or a no, or here's what he has to do before he gets accepted to The University of Texas.
Guys who have no hopes of qualifying don’t get this far. These guys can be identified by their public emphasis on academics while considering OU and the SEC. If a guy gets his transcript this far, he’s probably going to make it into Texas.
Then, the position coach takes it to the coordinator on either side of the ball, either Greg or Will. Then, that side of the ball, if it's Connor Wood, Case McCoy, the offense as a staff would watch it. Then they bring it to me. They bring a transcript to me. They bring the video to me. They write comments, each one of them. They have to watch them in different areas first, in different rooms. So they can write down what they think, so everybody doesn't sit in and just agree. We want to make sure we have opinions, because recruiting is difficult.
Secret ballot, imo. Not sure how I feel about this. I’d like to think that Brown has surrounded himself with assistants who aren’t influenced by groupthink. Guys who can hash it out among themselves and come to a decision that they’ll all then get behind.
Then I have to make a decision on whether we take a young man or not.
There’s another guy on staff who gets a final say now as well.
I don’t know how what we do compares to what other staffs do. Because of our in-state concentration, we obviously are able to get things done a lot more quickly. We can see all of our top targets probably within a week as compared to a team that is forced to do most of their recruiting out of state.
So we should leverage our advantage.
We’ll always get the majority of our players from Texas, but after we finish most of our recruiting by the end of February we should concentrate on 8-10 out of state guys.
Thoughts?