Parts Of Recruiting Are Random, Here's How To Get Over It

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You never know what the tipping point is that gets a college coach to buy in on a recruit.

Is it the right place, right time?

A coach stumbles upon a player’s Twitter profile at the right time?

Were they killing time at the airport and finally watched your hudl?

Was it an unexpected player entering the portal at an unexpected time?

Did your name come up when two coach buddies were catching up at a coaching clinic?

I’ve been helping specialists play in college for the better part of a decade now, and it is an uncomfortable feeling when a family or player credits you with their success - or really any coach or camp’s efforts with their success.

If we are all honest with ourselves, we don’t know what worked, exactly - we don’t know what the tipping point was in a player’s recruiting.

The success attributed to a camp or a coach or a recruiting service (this even can apply to private admissions counseling too) is mostly correlation and not causation.

Especially with kickers in 2024, coaches always do their own research and evaluations on field, at a summer camp, before pulling the trigger on a particular player. They almost never will offer a player sight unseen. Maybe there are 2-3 absolute studs like that out of high school a year. Too many coaches have been '“cat-fished” by rankings for them to be solely relied upon anymore.

The most any coach or recruiting service can ethically promise a player or parent is that their services are only designed to increase the likelihood of a successful offer but they cannot ultimately guarantee any particular result. That is, anyway, how I position what I do with families and players. And, if you read the fine print (for the services that bother to have them) you’ll see this language in their offerings too.

So, if you are following along, know that these services and camps boost your odds somewhat, but are by no means golden tickets to recruiting success.

How much do these services and camps boost your odds by anyway? That’s hard to quantify.

For ranking camps, if you can finish in the top 10-20 of the larger events you will need to physically be able to kick off 65 yards and hit 4.0 hang, make a 55+ yard FG and hit close to 50 5.0 on punts.

A good showing at a ranking camp will land you a spot on their coveted ranking page on their website.

College coaches will hit up Kohls, Sailer, Kornblue and insert whatever other 27 ranking camps there are, to see who is in their top 10-20. They will then ignore these camps’ attempts to make them pay for access to their player profiles and then just search who these kids are on hudl and Twitter/X.

That is really the net sum total benefit of these camps.

You are competing to get indexed higher on their website rankings to hopefully maybe get a college coach to notice you sooner than someone else and then hopefully maybe strike up a conversation with you first via Twitter/X.

That’s a lotta "hopefully maybe-ing” for a return on camps trying to lure you into a sales pipeline designed to extract a lot of money from you.

But, for some kids this is the thing that tipped a coach into looking their way.

For other players, their tipping point may have been an active private trainer or high school coach who really fought to pitch their players to colleges through personal outreach. If you look closely, you’ll see the private coaches and high school programs who have the best rosters of successful recruits all are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and call coaches on their players’ behalf when it makes academic and athletic sense to do so.

Again, though, like the ranking camps, this is still a hopefully maybe thing. There’s no guarantee that a college coach will like a referral pitched their way by a private trainer or high school coach enough to reach back out to them and start the recruiting process.

A great ranking, and a great private trainer or high school coach with massive college networks can be an asset to your recruiting but they won’t do everything. No coach or camp can make you taller, bigger, stronger, faster, or boost your grades, SAT or ACT to the point of admissibility. No matter how great of a showing you have at a camp or how great of a coach you are working with, you still need to adhere somewhat to the math of recruiting too.

By “math” I mean the largely immovable and timeless truths that apply, near universally to everyone. Truths like the average height and weight of an FBS kicker is 5’11 195lbs, and the average height and weight of the average FBS punter is 6’1 200lbs. Truths like the last class of specialists offered by the Ivy League in 2023 all had at least 1500 SAT + or 33 ACT +. Truths like the average FBS kicker will need to look like they have been eating and lifting and not showing up to camp like stick-sticky (anyone who watched 1990s Nickelodeon knows the reference). And across 32 NFL kickers there is only one guy as small as 5’7 156lbs.

Some recruits bask in the feeling that they’re being “slept on” and who doesn’t like a good underdog story? Kickers, it seems, in particular, seem to thrive on the sense of being an underdog. And, there’s nothing wrong with that. Anyone who possesses moderate athletic ability can work hard enough to hit a 50 yard FG consistently. But, that still doesn’t mean you are going to play for Alabama.

Recruiting is squishy. It’s a wild question that has no clear algorithm that spits out a reliably predictable result. It also is one of the last ways parents can feel like they’re guaranteeing their child a bright future and securing an admissions spot to a university that, but for football, they wouldn’t normally have been able to consider.

It’s a delicate dance between art and science, math and magic, and of hard work and luck. And, knowing where the line is between any of these opposing things is next to impossible.

But, rather than ignoring randomness, my advice is to accept it’s there, and that your best strategy is to do things that will ultimately increase the surface area of your luck.

I’ve never heard any college coach complain that their recruits’ grades were too good, they were too strong, their game tape was too impressive and their coach’s character reference was too glowing.

That’s all for now,

Coach Cahill

P.S. When you’re ready, I am running a series of individual strategy calls titled, “From Clueless To Getting Noticed By Coaches In 60 Minutes Or Less” where we will:

Sign up here, just 3 spots open a week @ 8pm EST → Book Strategy Call, “From Clueless To Getting Noticed By Coaches In 60 Minutes Or Less” Here