A typical day on the football recruiting trail

Southern Illinois was one of the top Division I-AA schools in the country last year and that ended up costing them their head coach, Jerry Kill. He made the move from Southern Illinois to Northern Illinois after helping his team make it to the final four of the I-AA playoffs.

But before he left, he posted on his blog about the recruiting process and what coaches have to go through this time of year. These are some interesting words about where he has traveled to and what he does to stay on top of recruiting. Coach Kill has to look at his roster in advance and figure out which pieces should go where. It is not an easy thing to do. Click here for the link to the Saluki Blog. Now onto the article.

You might think that since SIU’s football season ended last Saturday that the coaches have some free time and a chance to relax. Hardly.

The staff took its first Sunday off since last summer, but returned to work on Monday for a strategy session on recruiting. Most of the coaches then left Tuesday for a 10-day recruiting blitz. Signing day is Feb. 7 — two months from now.

Besides Illinois, the staff will visit schools and do in-home visits in Missouri, Kansas, Louisiana, Florida, Indianapolis and Memphis during the next two weeks.

A typical day on the recruiting trail starts early in the morning with a visit to a high school and can last until 11 p.m. at night with a visit to a prospect’s home.

“The culture has changed,” Coach Kill told me. “We may be in a home visiting a kid at 10 o’clock at night.”

Kill said they are focused primarily on high school seniors, though they may take a few junior college or I-A transfers.

“We certainly won’t turn down a good transfer, if it’s the right kind of transfer that fits into our program,” said Kill, who has typically shied away from troubled players looking for any I-AA program that will take them.

The biggest challenge is maintaining a competitive team year-in, year-out with just 63 scholarships, because it’s very difficult to spread the dollars evenly between each class. You can wind up with too much money tied up in a certain class and not have enough to fill recruiting needs.

“That’s why you’ll see a lot of schools that will go 9-4, 10-2, and then they’ll drop to 3-8, because you just run out of scholarship money,” Kill explained. “It’s very hard to continually win at this level, because of the scholarship situation. To this point, our staff has done a great job.”

Kill said because the Salukis have had the luxury of redshirting many younger players, the coaches have already identified and groomed some future replacements. That means the current crop of players they are recruiting will likely be filling in the gaps as redshirt freshmen in 2008.

“We almost try to look two years ahead,” Kill said.

Another method the Saluki staff uses to beat the odds is offering partial scholarships to some players. Obviously, you’re not going to get a 4-star recruit to take a partial scholarship, but good coaching and an excellent strength program can turn a suspect into a prospect.

“If we can build them up, then we will reward them later,” Kill said.

To see the entire blog entire, click here for the link.