College football

Signing Day isn't life or death in college football

Teams like Utah prove you don't need heralded recruits to build winner

Chris Graythen / Getty Images

Utah quarterback Brian Johnson wasn't a heralded recruit out of high school. Yet he led the Utes to an undefeated season and was named Mountain West Conference offensive player of the year.

OPINION

By John Walters

NBCSports.com

updated 9:00 p.m. ET Feb. 2, 2009

John Walters

In the past five years, only one program among all the 119 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision has produced two undefeated seasons: Utah. And yet in the past half-decade, the Utes have not signed a single player from the annual Rivals.com 100 list.

That grouping represents five hundred blue-chip players. Five hundred prep studs who signed with 53 different FBS schools, but none to Utah. Still, the Utes went 49-14 over that span, including a 12-0 season in 2004 and a recently completed 13-0 season.

By contrast Notre Dame has 13 recruits from the Rivals.com top 100. And look how the Irish have done.

“I’m going to be real honest with you,” says Dave Schramm, Utah’s offensive coordinator and recruiting coordinator. “I don’t pay much attention to those lists. They have absolutely no bearing on what we do.”

It isn’t that the scouts at Rivals or Scout or any of the major recruiting services are charlatans. Of the top 10 players on the 2004 Rivals 100 list, six are currently in the NFL, including Pro Bowl running back Adrian Peterson of the Minnesota Vikings.

Then again, it isn’t as if recruiting analysis is as sure a bet as, say, gravity. The other four players from Rivals’ top 10 in 2004 all transferred or were asked to leave their original schools (Rhett Bomar, QB, Oklahoma; Willie Williams, LB, Miami; Jeff Schweiger, OL, USC; and Xavier Lee, QB, Florida State). None from this foursome have yet played a down in the NFL — Lee played wide receiver last summer and fall for the semi-pro Southern New Hampshire Beavers; Bomar, who finished at Sam Houston State, has been invited to the NFL combine later this month.

“Here’s why I don’t put much stock in those lists: Those guys have no accountability whatsoever,” says Schramm, 45. “If we take a guy and he’s not very good, we get fired.”

Still, how does a program put together two undefeated seasons, BCS bowls included, in the past five years absent any five-star talent?

“Honestly, we don’t want to bring in the best high school football players,” says Schramm, who as a lightly recruited quarterback led all of Division III in touchdown passes at Cornell College in Iowa (and that was as a freshman). “We’re not looking for the guy who can play for us right now. What we want is the guy who’s going to be the best player three or four years down the line.”

Granted, it doesn’t pay for a school such as Utah to fish in the same holes where Pete Carroll, Urban Meyer and Jim Tressel have dropped a line heading into Signing Day on Wednesday. The Utes probably would have been eager to sign Terrelle Pryor if there were a realistic chance of his relocating to Salt Lake City.

“We recruit in-state primarily,” says Schramm, which in itself is a challenge since Utah is 34th nationally in terms of population. Compounding that is the Utes’ rivalry with Brigham Young, an institution with a richer gridiron history (pre-2004) and an unrivaled Mormon connection.

“After that, our outside areas are the state of California and Texas, the major metropolitan areas in those states,” Schramm says. “Arizona is another satellite.”

The lesson of Utah is two-fold: First, you can never do enough homework as a recruiter. And, second, Urban Meyer has the Midas touch.

Let’s tackle the second point first. In the past five seasons Meyer, currently the head coach at Florida, has either coached or recruited four different squads that either went undefeated or won a national championship. In 2004 he led the Utes to a 12-0 record. Granted, Meyer only spent two seasons at the base of the Wasatch Range; most of the Utes’ key players had been recruited by Meyer’s predecessor, Ron McBride, who spent 13 seasons at Utah.

Credit Meyer, however, with leading them to a 24-2 record in two seasons. In 2006 Meyer, as a beneficiary of Ron Zook’s recruiting prowess and his own coaching acumen, led a one-loss Florida team to the national championship.

But this past season, Meyer’s mastery was on full display. The Gators, starting almost exclusively underclassmen recruited by Meyer, won the national championship with a 12-1 record. The Utes, led mostly by players recruited by Meyer, finished 13-0 and beat Alabama in the Sugar Bowl.