Texas recruiting coordinator Brian Jean-Mary does not conduct many interviews, but provided a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how the staff pulled off a successful recruiting class in 2016. He explained their recruiting approach and cleared up a lot of misconceptions about the program.
Here is what Jean-Mary said after Charlie Strong’s press conference on Wednesday:
- Strong said 32 recruits visited campus, and Texas picked up 24 commitments this year. It was a risky approach because the staff obtained 75 percent of the athletes who visited their campus. I do not have a number to compare that to, but needless to say, that hit rate is impressive. Jean-Mary said, “That is really one of coach Strong’s biggest recruiting rules. He doesn’t want a kid to come in that’s not genuinely interested in the program as a whole, or interested in the university, because he says it waters down the process. If they’re there with someone who is interested, they could influence him (interested recruit) in a negative way. He always believes that kid has to show you that he’s interested to come, not just by a phone call (saying) I’d like to take a visit. Taking a visit to him is just taking a trip. You want to bring them in, and you want to have them engaged about not just the program, but the academics and the university, and the city of Austin as a whole.”
- Jean-Mary said even though schools can have up to 50 official visitors during certain years, Strong’s philosophy has always been to have a low number of official visits. The assistant said their official visit number is usually in the mid-to-late 30s, but 32 is abnormal.
- One of the things that makes Strong such a good recruiter is “what you see is what you get," according to Jean-Mary. He said, “I don’t think he tries to pretend to be something he’s not. It doesn’t matter the demographic of the family he’s going to recruit. He’s going to be himself. He can relax and talk about anything from politics to sports to you name it. We were at Jordan Elliott’s house, and were talking about westerns. His grandma loves westerns. I forgot which western was on, and he started rattling off about eight or nine westerns. My eyes opened, and I’m like how do you do this stuff? He grabs their attention. I don’t think there’s a home he doesn’t go in where there is subject that he can’t touch upon where he’s had some kind of experience that really grabs the people in room.”
- I asked Jean-Mary to break down the staff’s recruiting approach, especially the late evaluations of seniors. He said what appears to be a late evaluation, or offer, from the outside is usually not the correct observation: “Well, I’ll say this. Of the 24 kids we signed, I would like to say nine of them, we didn’t offer until spring practice going into their senior year. Then I would say another four of them, we didn’t offer until we watched senior video. You’re always evaluating. I know people always assume we’re just throwing offers on the wall, and we’re just trying to fill a number. Just pick this kid’s name out the air and say we’re going to offer him. It’s a process. We mentioned Chris Daniels. We’ve been recruiting him for a year. We had some issues last year with a particular defensive tackle [Du’Vonta Lampkin], and we wanted to make sure academically he was going to check out. Once he checked out, and we didn’t know he was going to commit the next day, we said we were going to offer him after evaluating his senior video. We felt like his senior video was a lot better than his junior video, and we told him that. Even with some of the guys we didn’t get, you guys would be amazed at the phone calls that we get from a prospect, or a coach, a family member, saying this kid is very, very interested. We don’t offer him if we think he’s a good player because we always want to do our background on the kid first. Almost like the official visits, he doesn’t water down the offer list. We try to do as much homework on kids as possible.”
- When I asked Jean-Mary how the staff seemingly rallies in the fourth quarter of recruiting, he said they are not playing catch up. He said outside of Chris Daniels’ situation, they were in touch with every kid who stepped on campus for at least one year, or at least the spring. Jean-Mary said, “I will say this. If it was that easy to swoop in the fourth quarter and get what we consider high-level prospects, more people would do it. We put a lot of work in when nobody is watching to give ourselves the opportunity to come in and get those guys.”
- Jean-Mary said linebacker Erick Fowler had never been on UT’s campus prior to his official visit. Fowler had been to football games, but never on campus. Fowler attended two games as an unofficial visitor, which made the staff believe they had a shot to land the Austin product.
- Every staff usually has to report to the head coach about recruits, but Texas’ approach to making phone calls is different: “We try to call while we’re all together, and we pass the phone to each other, so every kid has a certain level of comfort with every coach, which makes it easier when you get on campus. If the only person that kid talked to is the coach that recruits him, guess what’s going to happen when he walks through the door? He’s going to go to that coach, and now you’re going to have to have the icebreaker with the rest of the staff. The good thing we do we do is we’re passing the phone to every coach, and he’s talking to the parent, he’s talking to the kid. Guess what happens when he walks through the door? This is coach B.J., this is coach (Chris) Vaughan, this is coach (Brick) Haley, and the ice is already broken. Now we can get down to the nuts and bolts of things and get to recruiting. What do you like about us, and we’ll tell you what we like about you. We’ll start this recruiting process.”
- Jean-Mary said the staff is pretty confident each person will qualify academically. However, some players still have some classroom work to do, and he wants to put an asterisk by that statement. To their knowledge, most players are on track to graduate and qualify academically.
- When asked about the 2017 class, Jean-Mary said the staff will not change their approach. They do not believe in backing players into a corner and forcing them to decide: “If someone can force you to make a decision, it’s very easy for another person to come out and make you change your mind about what you just did.”
- Here was Jean-Mary’s breakdown of Shane Buechele’s recruitment: “He came and really committed during camp. We have a quarterback camp in the summer, and he had come for the second year. We had our eyes on him pretty early. He was one of those kids, obviously, everybody felt like was going to be a big lean to the school up north because of family ties. We did a great job, once he got on campus, on selling him on our vision and what we saw for a quarterback in our future. Like I said, once we got him, a lot of people came knocking on his door, but he held true to being a Longhorn.”
- Jean-Mary said their biggest emphasis was getting bigger to stop the run. They are on the right track and linebacker and defensive back. In addition, they wanted to have more depth.
- Last year, the biggest pitch to recruits was playing time. I asked Jean-Mary what this year’s pitch was, and here is what he told me: “Most kids when they see five wins, especially at a place like this, they see opportunity. Five wins is not the standard here. Even though we played a lot of young guys, we told them the young guys on the field didn’t do a good enough job, which they knew, and there was going to be opportunity. They saw a lot of young guys play, and they felt like they could come in here and compete. That was the best thing about the kids that you saw, the ones that actually came (visited campus), because every school that recruited against us, their pitch to them was why would you go there with all the kids they have there? You’re going to be stacked behind potentially good players. Why would you go there? That’s says a lot about the kids that they came here and wanted to compete at a high level.”
