The Rounding Up/Rounding Down Dynamic
Here's what I've learned after fifteen years coaching high school football and helping families navigate the recruiting process: High school players and families consistently round up on talent. College coaches systematically round down. This perceptual mismatch—not lack of talent, not lack of effort—is what creates the disappointment that defines most recruiting experiences.
In high school football, we operate on non-zero-sum values. Coaches play guys because they like them, because they want to champion them, because they believe in their potential. If a kid drops a pass in practice, they think about the fifty catches he made that season. They round up. That's not just coaches being soft—it's literally a coach’s job. No high school coach loses their position because a kicker misses in the fourth quarter or a quarterback throws a pick.
College coaches? They're recruiting their own job security. They operate in a purely zero-sum environment where playing time is finite and every decision can cost them their livelihood. When they watch your son at that camp and he drops an easy interception in shorts and t-shirts, they don't think "just one play." They think: What will he do on the goal line in the conference championship game? They round down.
The players who eventually get recruited are the ones who leave no doubt. But here's the problem: most seventeen-year-olds have never been taught to evaluate themselves through that lens.
The Market Reality Nobody Talks About
Let me give you the landscape as it exists right now:
The roster is now limited to 105 players. Teams want to limit revenue share money. The transfer portal has flooded the market with experienced, battle-tested, well-paid athletes who are 22, 23, 24, even 25 years old. Your high school senior isn't competing with other eighteen-year-olds anymore. He's competing with essentially professional athletes for limited spots.
Here's what that means in practice: The bubble guys at FBS programs, now go to FCS programs, the bubble guys at FCS programs now go to DII/DIII programs.
This isn't a commentary on anyone getting worse. It's a recognition that the bar got significantly higher. Never before has reclassing or doing a post-graduate year made so much athletic sense for players targeting top-25 academic schools.
Most families are still operating on the 2018 playbook. The game changed. The gap widened.
The Irony Test
I have one diagnostic question I use with families, and it exposes the reality gap immediately:
If your son is legitimately a DI prospect, they should have no problem accruing interest from smaller, more local colleges and universities.
The most ironic thing I see is families getting hung up on a DI dream school when they haven't even had the coach from the DIII down the road return a text or call. If you can't get the regional DIII coach interested, what makes you think you're going to get the DI coach interested?
This isn't meant to be harsh. It's meant to be clarifying.
There really is a place where what your son wants, what you as parents want, and what the college football market wants will overlap. That is where his best opportunities will be. But most families only focus on the first two circles of that Venn diagram. They ignore the third circle—market reality—and then wonder why nothing is working.
The DIII vs. DI Dilemma Is Usually Moot
Let me be direct: most players are not going to be DI, physically. Bigger, faster, stronger players go play at bigger, more glamorous schools. That's not a value judgment. It's biomechanics and market dynamics.
But here's the thing families miss: Every college coach wants to feel like they are getting a steal. The DIII players who get early offers are the ones who probably, if they waited, would be recruited by bigger FCS or even lower-level FBS programs eventually. The DIII coaches know this. They move early on guys who are still growing into their bodies, still developing, still under-recruited.
So the smart play? Get in front of DIII coaches early. Let them feel like they discovered you. Meanwhile, if you really are a DI prospect, those bigger programs will find you. DI coaches have massive recruiting budgets and databases. If you're good enough, they'll come calling. But banking everything on that possibility while ignoring the DIII interest is how families end up with nothing.
Why The Gap Exists: College as Abstraction
College is far too abstract a concept for most young people. They've been told their entire K-12 career that all their efforts are directed toward this destination, but few have any direct experience with it.
I can't tell you how many families I've worked with who have never actually visited a college campus with their son. Not for a game. Not for a tour. Nothing. How is a seventeen-year-old supposed to accurately assess whether he can compete at a certain level when he's never even seen what that level looks like in person?
This is why I push families hard to do summer programs, to visit campuses, to attend camps. Not just for exposure to coaches (though that matters), but for exposure to the reality of college. What does a DIII locker room look like versus an FCS program? What do the players look like in person? How big are they? How fast? You can't answer these questions from highlight reels and Instagram follows.
When kids go to a college and actually experience it—sleep in a dorm, navigate a campus, do their own laundry, make new friends in a strange place—it gives them the confidence that they can stand on their own two feet. It also gives them a reality check about what level they can compete at.
The Behaviors That Sabotage Recruiting
Here's the paradox nobody talks about: recruiting tends to create behaviors and beliefs that are antithetical to what it takes to be a great football player and teammate.
Recruiting is a total obsession with the player as a final product versus the player as a product in process. Self-promotion. Curating one's image online. Obsessively checking who is following you or DMing you. Endlessly posting highlights, especially after a loss. All of this takes focus away from being a great teammate and from being a great football player.
The true irony? The less concerned you usually are with all the ancillary bells and whistles and social media of recruiting, the better you tend to play. And the better you play, the easier the recruiting process becomes.
But families don't see it that way. They think more posts, more camps, more emails equals more interest. Sometimes that's true. Often, it just means more noise.
The Parent Dilemma
I have enormous empathy for parents in this process. You're torn between wanting college to be your child's experience but also knowing that they don't know what they don't know. Some parents go so far as to impersonate their child on Twitter, reaching out to coaches, posting highlights, sending DMs that only a millennial or boomer might send.
You don't want to abdicate your kid. But you also don't want to be that parent.
Here's the calculus college coaches are making: The amount of problems a parent can generate for a program is proportional to how much talent their kid brings as a player, teammate, and student. As soon as that ratio gets off balance, you can expect there to be problems.
Translation: If your son is a first-team all-conference type player with a 3.8 GPA and great character, you can be a little involved and coaches will tolerate it. If your son is a borderline roster guy, even mild parent involvement can sink his chances.
Fair? Maybe not. Reality? Absolutely.
Closing the Gap
So how do you close the reality gap?
First, get really honest about market reality. Not what you hope. Not what you think is fair. What the market is actually telling you. If no coaches are returning calls, that's data. If the only interest is coming from schools two levels below where you think your son should play, that's data too.
Second, operate in the overlap. Find the place where player wants, parent wants, and market reality intersect. That Venn diagram overlap is where real opportunities exist.
Third, go there. Visit campuses. Attend games. Do summer programs. Make college concrete, not abstract. Your son needs to see what DIII actually looks like, what FCS looks like, what his body and skills look like compared to the players already there.
Fourth, play the long game on being a great player and teammate. The recruiting stuff—the camps, the emails, the highlights—matters. But not as much as actually getting better. The best marketing is playing well on Friday nights.
Finally, remember what this is really about. College recruiting isn't just about football. It's about helping your son grow from a teenager into an adult. It's about teaching him how to handle rejection, how to persist, how to self-promote tastefully, how to make hard decisions about his future.
The reality gap will always exist. Coaches will tend to round down on talent. But if you can teach your son to evaluate himself clearly, to understand the market, and to find the overlap where opportunity actually lives, he'll be light years ahead of the kid still think he's five-star level while the phone sits silent.
Coach Cahill
PS If you’d ever like to work together, you can schedule a discovery call today