Curtis Blackwell, left, coordinates recruiting for MSU coach Mark Dantonio. The process has changed since Blackwell went through it.
When Curtis Blackwell was a promising defensive back at Detroit King in the mid-1990s, college football recruiting was a lot different than it is today.
Blackwell attended a few college camps the summer after his junior year. He played his senior season in 1995, when coaches watched his games. They invited him to watch their games. He had offers from a few schools, including Western Michigan and Central Michigan. But he chose Hampton, a historically black college in Virginia. His recruitment barely lasted a year. But that was 20 years ago.
Blackwell is now the recruiting coordinator for Michigan State’s football program, and the process of identifying, recruiting and obtaining talent — which will culminate Wednesday during National Signing Day — has become among the most drawn out, complex and highly competitive at any level of sports.
“Most kids verbally commit in their 11th-grade year,” Blackwell said. “That means you’ve got to start recruiting them in their 10th-grade year. So you’ve got to know who they are in the ninth. You’ve got to recruit them, maybe offer them (a scholarship) in the 10th. They might commit in the 11th, and then they sign their senior year.
“So it’s like a four-year process possibly, whereas back when I was in high school you just did all this stuff your senior year.”
The recruiting process has accelerated at almost warp speed, rendering recruits’ senior seasons almost meaningless.
“Most recruits are committed before their senior season,” said Josh Helmholdt, Midwest recruiting analyst for Rivals.com. “So for very few players does their senior season even matter as it relates to the recruiting process. The junior season is much, much more important and increasingly more important is the sophomore season, which really kind of gets kids on the radar. But as we’ve seen, even freshman seasons are getting kids on the radar.”
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Helmholdt said Rivals.com has documented 10 players from the 2019 class — current high school freshmen — who have been offered scholarships by Michigan. And that’s hardly unique.
“It was uncommon 10 years ago,” he said. “But no, it’s not really that uncommon anymore.”
There are myriad recruiting rules set forth by the NCAA. They are so complex that they can leave even an experienced recruiter reaching for his NCAA manual. Rules govern just about every conceivable point in the process, especially how much contact schools can have with recruits.
But the verbal offer is what remains at the core of recruiting, and unfortunately it’s entirely unofficial and fairly secretive, because schools don’t announce offers and NCAA rules forbid them from commenting on recruits until they sign a national letter of intent.
In 2010, the NCAA changed a bylaw that delayed when a school could send out a written offer from Sept. 1 of a recruit’s junior year to Aug. 1 of his senior year. That has made verbal offers the accepted norm.
A school can make a verbal offer of a scholarship to a player at any point in his life. For instance, Sam Johnson III, a big quarterback with a strong arm, had eight offers before he began his freshman season at Southfield High last fall. A player can verbally commit to a school at any point, as well.
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But both sides also can back out at any point. Until a recruit signs his national letter of intent in February, the process is largely unbinding.
“Well, I think the NCAA recognizes that it’s out of control and that sooner or later they are going to have to make changes in the rules to try to get a handle on it,” Helmholdt said. “Now, I don’t know how effective that is going to be or how quickly that’s going to be done. Certainly one topic that’s being discussed is having an early signing period. And that would eliminate a lot of this.
“The NCAA does not respect a verbal commitment whatsoever. It means nothing to them officially. What does matter is the signed letter of intent. If you have players, prospects who can sign a letter of intent the summer before their senior season, those can’t be pulled by the school without ramifications. So that will clean up a lot of what you see happening in December and January, with the kind of musical chairs in recruiting classes going on.”
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A lot of the late flip-flopping from schools and recruits, among other practices, has given the recruiting process a black eye — and left teenagers like Matt Falcon with crushed dreams and a wounded sense of trust.
Falcon, a highly rated senior running back at Southfield High, was set to join coach Jim Harbaugh at Michigan. His recruitment began as a freshman, Ohio State made him an offer as a sophomore, and he eventually received what he considered 15 “serious” offers. After Michigan offered him a scholarship last winter, he committed in April. Both, of course, were verbal agreements.
“Harbaugh was real pleased to have me at that time,” Falcon said. “It was real great. The fans were great. My family loved Michigan. So it was just a great decision overall.
“I went to a lot of the Michigan events over the summer, recruited well for them, got a lot of eyes on them as far as … I don’t know if they reached out to every single player out there, but I know that I put my name in and talked to a lot of recruits for Michigan.”
Falcon felt he had made a deep investment in Michigan. But in the first scrimmage before his senior season, he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his knee for the second time and required a third surgery. Michigan coaches stopped all contact with Falcon for a month. His mother, Calvette, finally got Harbaugh on the phone around late September.
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“He basically said … Not basically, but he did say that I wouldn’t be able to come to Michigan and play football for them,” Falcon said. “But I would only be able to attend as a student.”
Falcon said U-M would give him a four-year scholarship to attend school but not play football. U-M recruiting coordinator Chris Partridge set up a meeting in Ann Arbor with himself, Falcon, Falcon’s parents, Harbaugh and doctors, who explained further why they thought Falcon couldn’t play football.
On Friday, Harbaugh defended his general recruiting tactics as a “meritocracy,” and interim athletic director Jim Hackett told reporters the reasons scholarships are pulled are many, including injuries.
“We find out that people have been terminally injured so they can’t pass a physical here,” Hackett said. “With those people, in some cases, we’ve offered to pay their educational (expenses).”
Falcon said he isn’t angry at Michigan and has committed to play at Western Michigan, where he hopes to pursue his NFL dream.
“It’s a business,” he said of recruiting. “I know that. It’s just disappointing. That’s all.”
Overall, Blackwell believes the recruiting process is a good one.
“I think it’s a lot more positive than negative,” he said. “More kids are getting offers.”
One of the reasons for those increased offers has been the availability of highlight film through YouTube and Hudl.
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“It’s film at your fingertips,” Helmholdt said. “You don’t have to call a coach and have him mail out a VHS tape and wait two weeks for it to come, and you have 50 of them stacked up. That’s certainly allowed more kids to be evaluated more quickly and has resulted in more scholarship offers going out and going out earlier in the process.”
Another positive change, Helmholdt noted, has been the ability of social media to make the recruiting process more transparent.
“Coaches can’t tell five kids at the same position, ‘Hey, you’re going to be the starter,’ because they all talk and they all share notes and they all tweet about it,” Helmholdt said.
And, of course, there’s always that feel-good story. The recruit who pans out after a long and steady recruitment. That was the story of MSU defensive lineman Malik McDowell, who just finished a stellar freshman season after Blackwell recruited him out of Southfield High.
“We didn’t think we were going to get him, and then on signing day he announced that he would come to Michigan State,” Blackwell said. “It shocked everybody. And then after that he didn’t sign. He waited and waited. He never signed his letter.
“And then he finally signed, and he’s been a freshman All-American, All-Big Ten player and probably will be a preseason All-American candidate for next year. Local, hometown player, No. 1 player in the state of Michigan. We had to work really hard to get him recruited. But that’s a kid I’ve known since he was in the eighth grade.”
Contact Carlos Monarrez: cmonarrez@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez. Join us for live blogs of National Signing Day and the MSU-Michigan basketball game at freep.com/sports. And download our new Wolverines Xtra app for free on Apple and Android devices!