The Dead Months of Recruiting

Recruiting comes in waves. If you've been through a cycle, you already feel it. If you haven't, here's the rhythm of a year:

• June — INSANITY
• July — Crazy
• August — DEAD
• September — Sorta dead
• October — Busy
• November — Busier (end of season, coaches on the road to HS's)
• December — CRAZY (coaches visiting until the holidays; portal opens)
• January — Quiet
• February — Lining up Junior Day visits
• March — JUNIOR DAY MADNESS
• April (1st half) — Spring ball visits
• April 2nd half – mid May — Campus visits and showcases, busy
• End of May — Quiet, prep for camps

Memorial Day to mid-July is an absolute mad dash — families traveling all over the country to camps. Then things start to shift. It gets quieter. Almost dead.

You can bet there will be almost zero recruiting movement in August.

It's coaches' last chance to go on vacation and spend time with their family, and/or they are starting to prepare for their actual jobs — coaching. Feel free to send weekly or biweekly short updates with training clips or scrimmage film as preseason gets going, but please do not expect much to happen.

If you find yourself going into fall without a committable offer, you have fallen into the Fall Eval bucket. Whether or not a team takes you then comes down to a few factors:

• If you were hurt during the summer and couldn't camp well — are you back 100% healthy and crushing it on the field for your team?
• If you were a borderline academic guy — are you hitting the GPA/SAT/ACT scores coaches needed to get you through admissions?
• Is the guy already on the roster performing poorly enough that coach thinks he needs to bring in a high school guy to compete now?

My advice is to continue to send regular updates to the coaches you already have contact with from the summer, while also reaching out to other target schools.

Things can change so much over the course of a season that what looked like a promising potential late offer from one school can, by week 2 or 3, turn into “yeah, we're good now, we don't need to take Johnny.”

Timing, chance and luck all get votes on your recruitment too.

Until you have a committable offer, you do not have a committable offer.

Coaches can send you pleasantries and niceties galore — some are just that way by nature — but listen. I would not bet the farm waiting on a coach to come through with a late offer. It's not that you shouldn't believe coaches or trust they have you on their boards. It's that so many other factors are happening behind the scenes that can throw you off.

So sure, trust what coaches say, but continue to develop your own recruiting insurance policy until that committable offer comes through.

And most of the time, if you just aren't getting coaches to reply to you, you probably are just looking at a level of college football that is out of your league — and you should strongly consider smaller schools where you would be more of a steal for a team.

— Brendan