Coaches put in a lot of time, miles and effort as they pursue high school athletes.
BRIAN CHRISTOPHERSON / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Wednesday, February 6, 2008 6:00 pm
It takes a minute, maybe two, not much longer.
The coach sees the way the feet move, the way the hips move, the burst to space, the something special that separates the main character on the screen from all the other guys in all those other highlight tapes cluttering the desk.
He sees potential. It’s really then that the tough work starts.
Football coaches don’t just hand out scholarships because of two minutes of game film, after all.
There are steps you must follow before making that grand gesture of extending a scholarship offer to a young man fresh off junior prom.
“You can see ability often early,” Husker tight ends coach Ron Brown says. “But it takes a while to see character, and it takes a while to see resiliency. You can watch a highlight tape of a kid and see the upside of a kid and his great moments. But when you watch a whole game, you can tell what happens in the first half versus the second half, what happens when his team is way down.”
Does he take a play off when the team’s down 38-0?
If a guy looks good on a highlight tape, coaches like to watch a couple different game films.
If he still looks good, that’s when you start talking to coaches, teachers, counselors, anyone with insight into the player.
Of course, several coaches are better than one when it comes to grading recruits.
The Husker coaches used group recruiting often in the past two months. Since the new staff was named in December, getting on the same page quickly was necessary if this recruiting class was going to be worth anything.
Brown credits Ted Gilmore, recruiting coordinator/receivers coach, and Shawn Watson, offensive coordinator, for bringing the new coaches up to speed on recruiting targets.
From there, the film watching began. And there was a lot of film watched, often with several coaches in the room.
“To the best of your ability you try to do it with a group effort,” Brown says. “One of the things you don’t want to get to doing as a coach is just getting so individually oriented that you look at a kid on film and say, “Oh, we should offer him, (or) ‘No, we’re not going to offer him.’ I think you throw it out there for your fellow coaching buddies and say, ‘Let’s all take a look at it.’ We did a lot of that. We watched a lot of film together as a staff in the short period of time we were together.”
As NU linebackers coach Mike Ekeler says of the past two months: “It was crazy, it was nuts.”
Says offensive line coach Barney Cotton: “It was kind of a planned scramble.”
Recruiting is an inexact science, Cotton says. You never know for sure if the player you like will make it big, but you trust your instincts and keep moving.
A few years ago, before he was at Nebraska, Husker running backs coach Tim Beck once spotted a prep receiver in Oklahoma he was sure was golden. The kid was off everyone’s radar, about to go to some community college.
Kansas was already in two-a-days, but Beck just had a feeling about the kid. He called Jayhawks coach Mark Mangino.
Marcus Henry had 10 touchdowns and more than 1,000 yards receiving for a Kansas team that went 12-1 this past year.
You hit some. You miss some. You look for any help you can get, especially if it comes from an athletic director who won three national titles as a head coach.
Brown says people should not underestimate the work Tom Osborne did while serving as both athletic director and a recruiter during the transition from Bill Callahan’s staff to Bo Pelini’s.
“People look at him and say, ‘Ah, he’s a figurehead.’ No, he’s more than a figurehead,” Brown says. “He’s an active ingredient in the recruiting process. He rolled up his sleeves and stinking went to work.”
When national signing day finally rolled around, the Huskers had 28 commitments. It was not the most highly rated class, but coaches say this is not going to be a staff that dictates its practices by what outsiders think.
“We’re very, very happy with the group we’re bringing in and it has a lot of potential,” Ekeler says. “But there’s nothing more common than wasted talent, so we just got to get it all out of these guys and don’t let them waste any of it.”