College football coaches prepare for a frenzied June

May 15—Scot Loeffler is giving his assistant coaches the final week of May off.

The Bowling Green head coach knows a storm is on the horizon. Call it Hurricane Recruiting.

After a 15-month moratorium, recruiting visits are returning June 1, creating the specter of an unprecedented 27-day stretch in the sport's history, with thousands of players converging on campuses where they'll be evaluated by coaches and ushered into the college football industrial complex, which has spun off its axis since March 13, 2020.

"We're going to work every day," Loeffler said. "It'll probably be worse than the season. With all the new rules and how they're doing business in June, it's going to be a busy month for us all."

When the coronavirus pandemic roared across the country in March of 2020, shutting down virtually all aspects of life, college football did not go unscathed, as spring practices, camps, and recruiting visits were halted with, in some cases, mere hours of notice.

The in-person evaluation period is crucial in identifying who fits a program, and it involves players visiting your campus and targeting them in future recruiting efforts. All coaches could do the past 14 months is converse via FaceTime or Zoom and watch game tape. There were no campus visits, no in-home visits, and no high school visits.

"There's an urgency and an excitement that young kids want to get out and see the campus," Toledo coach Jason Candle said. "This is usually as close to a year-round thing as it can be, and we haven't had that. Everything has been compressed down. The floodgates will open. It will all be about organization and getting the right people to come see you. You want to use your camps in an educated manner to get as many kids evaluated as possible."

The classes of 2022 and 2023 are in a unique position, almost a throwback to the pre-recruiting service dark ages when analysis was scant. A month's worth of official and unofficial visits should offer a truer glimpse of where players stack up. Schools are behind, but they're all on equal footing.

Programs benefited from creativity during the dead period. However, nothing can replicate meeting someone, talking to them in person, and witnessing their skillset from a few yards away.

"Everybody has to trust their evaluation," Candle said. "The videotape tells the story and a workout in shorts at a summer camp confirms the videotape, much like the NFL combine confirms a great college prospect's videotape. But if you don't have good videotape, it doesn't matter what you do at camps. You have to play well for your high school."

NCAA rules allow teams to have 10 days of camps. Ohio State will use all 10, BGSU will host six days, and Toledo will have four. Michigan has not finalized its camp schedule.

Findlay offensive tackle Luke Montgomery, a four-star prospect who's ranked No. 51 nationally, will attend OSU's camp June 1-2.

"I'm just excited to see what the future holds, and I'm just going to keep grinding and use this as motivation to keep working," Montgomery told The Blade in April.

The Falcons aim to get as many seniors on campus as possible. Their hope is to immerse players into campus and the football program. Underclassmen and unofficial visits are other areas of concentration. And unofficial visits have a new level of importance because an NCAA waiver gives coaches permission to work out players whose recruitment was impacted by the pandemic, a list that's essentially infinite.

"Those are going to be very similar to pro workout days," Loeffler said. "A guy comes in, he sees your facilities, he meets with your coaches, and he works out. The ability to work a guy out, see him live, be around him, watch him compete, you're far less likely to miss. Can you still miss? Of course you can. But you're able to have a portion of the physical evaluation process and see the mentality that you usually don't get."

The extra assessment could have the effect of widening or narrowing the scope of a team's recruiting big board, zeroing in on a particular area of need, and identifying an under-the-radar prospect who otherwise wouldn't have been discovered.

"They did a great job of finding another avenue for kids to be evaluated," Candle said. "I think that's what we're all searching for. But I would caution that we still have our own football team here to tend to. You can't turn your entire focus to the month of June and recruiting. You need a happy medium and a good balance."

Candle cautions that the same should be true for recruits, urging them to find stability during a summer that might feel like more is better. The year-plus pause on most recruiting activities has generated a sense of urgency that may not be necessary and could have a negative impact.

"What I'd hate to see young people do is try to go to 6,000 camps this summer and miss a bunch of time with their high school football team," Candle said. "At the end of the day, what you're there to do is play really well for your school and your high school coach. We'd like to see that happen. I don't want to see kids getting gassed out in June because they felt like they had to go to 37 camps."

Immediately following the onset of the pandemic, there was intrigue about how it would influence recruiting. The popular opinion was that it would cause a dry spell of commitments, but the opposite happened as high school seniors wanted to lock up their spots because of the uncertainty swirling.

The question is being posed again: How will June sway recruits? Is a tsunami of commitments looming?

"I do think there will be a lot of commitments in June and July," said Allen Trieu, a recruiting analyst at 247Sports. "The lack of visits has held up a lot of kids from making the decision and with spots being limited and their own high school practices starting in August for the most part, I think these guys will want to get verbals made before then."

Only 13 schools have double-digit commitments for 2022, and only 29 have more than five. Ohio State, which owns the No. 1 class, has 12, Michigan has seven, UT has two, and BG has one.

Georgia, Florida State, and Boston College's three commitments among the class of 2023 prospects lead the country. Schools will have more than 85 scholarship players this season because of the NCAA allowing seniors to return for an extra year. College football's version of amnesty will end before the 2022 season, adding importance to a team's recruiting hit rate.

Now, coaches can make those decisions based on real-life visuals.

"The student-athletes at our university and around the country are taking classes online and on Zoom," Candle said. "I don't think that's the same as an in-person classroom experience. Recruiting is the same. Interpersonal communication and face-to-face communication is so critical. Getting a chance to really get a feel for what the program is like inside the walls of the building instead of what you read or see on social media is a piece that's been missing."

First Published May 15, 2021, 11:00am