Former Nebraska head coach Tom Osborn on the football recruiting process and how it has changed

The Nebraska Rivals website, HuskerIllustrated.com, caught up with former Cornerhusker coach Tom Osborn.  This legendary coach is now the Athletic Director in Lincoln, Nebraska.  Osborn has spent most of his life coaching and found a great deal of success winning ball games with Nebraska.  One of their writers, John Talman, caught up with Osborn and talked to him about how things have changed with recruiting.  This is a pay article so I will only pull a limited amount of quotes from it.  Please click here to view the entire article, which is worth checking out.  Here are some of the things that stood out to me throughout it:

“Well I didn’t recruit all that long ago to where there have been just huge changes,” Osborne said. “But from the time that I started coaching, there has been a lot of change. Back in the 60′s…National Signing Day was May and you had a conference letter of intent that came out in February. Recruiting went on forever. You’d start doing some recruiting in the fall, in December and January through May. That gave you a couple months in the summer and you’re right back at it.  For a long time, the head coach could make unlimited recruiting contacts,” Osborne recalled. “So, as a result, a lot of players wanted the head coach there when they signed the national letter.”  With the rules being the way they were, he recalls that Nebraska’s first 5,000-yard passer David Humm took “12 trips” during his recruiting process.

The biggest changes, according to Osborn, were made within the last twenty years.  I can imagine how crazy things would be if they allowed unlimited contact these days.

Osborne says since then, the recruiting calendar has obviously been shortened. He explained that by the time he retired in the late 1990′s, the calendar was fairly close to how it is today.  He also added the other difference between his days as head coach and today as an athletic director, is the increased media attention, specifically on the internet. At the same time, Osborne made it clear that it wasn’t completely unheard of during the late portion of his coaching career.  It wasn’t like we were flying under the radar,” Osborne said. “The thing that probably has changed a little bit is the intensity of the bloggers, and the internet although that was certainly there in the 90′s. That became somewhat difficult because you had so many rumors that were false that started on the internet. I think that’s probably even more intense today.”

Regarding his next quote, I think that most major prospects end up avoiding the media at least for a while.  10 to 15 calls maybe one night a week could happen but I would hope that media would respect athletes enough to not do that.

“That’s the point when you kind of felt sorry for the recruits,” Osborne said. “They were not only being called by coaches, and the coaches are limited to one call a week, but there are no limits on the recruiting services and people who are acting in the recruiting arena from the media. A young man might have 10-15 calls in an evening, two of them would be from coaches and the rest were people asking him…what he was going to do, when he’s going to visit this and where is he leaning.”

“Kids who are juniors, sometimes even sophomores, are now committing,” Osborne said. “You see that in a lot of other sports too like volleyball, or you’re seeing kids in basketball commit very, very early. The difficult thing about that, sometimes they change a lot, just in the last year or two of their high school career.  So somebody that looks very promising as a sophomore will not improve or be any better as a senior. Whereas some kids come out of the woodwork late, so I think that whole early commit process is a little bit disturbing.”

“I think there are times if you go visit a school, [and] it’s the first one you’ve seen, you’re going to be impressed,” Osborne said. “Sometimes people put a lot of pressure on kids. They say here is a scholarship, and you’ve got 24 hours to think it over, and if you don’t take this scholarship, we’re going to go on to the next player.

“Kids that commit under those circumstances don’t feel good about it three or four months later and begin to wonder what they did. So I think the earliness of the commitment process and sometimes pressure techniques… I think the player feels maybe I haven’t been dealt with totally with integrity. I think the idea of de-commitment is certainly a lot more common today than it ever was. Sometimes the word commitment doesn’t mean very much. That’s unfortunate – but it is true.

Can I stress to those readers out there how little a questionnaire means to the recruiting process?

The legendary head coach talked about their philosophy as a staff being based on distinct characteristics centered on hard work and honesty.

“We tried to be very thorough,” Osborne said. “We would send out several thousand questionnaires to high school coaches all around the country. Some didn’t bother to send them back, but we got a huge response in terms of players that these coaches recommended to be possible players at Nebraska. Then the question is how thorough can you be in evaluating those players?

“We tried to look at film, some schools looked heavily at the recruiting services’ ratings…we didn’t pay much attention to that. We seldom got a Parade All-American here and some schools would get three to seven Parade All-Americans every year. We were able to do very well against those teams. I thought it was mostly a matter of doing your homework… We also never promised or inferred playing time which is very common now.”

At the end Osborn talks about how many tapes a school like Nebraska gets.  Imagine the numbers at USC:

However, when it comes to recruiting, Osborne has tried to not get involved with the staff doing the job he believes they have to do themselves as coaches.

“I don’t want to tell them how to recruit,” Osborne stated.

It doesn’t hurt Nebraska either that Osborne meets with the majority of recruits that come to Lincoln for unofficial and official visits. He says that he probably sits down to talk with “95 percent” of the football recruits that take trips to NU.

Aside from that, Osborne says he doesn’t want to get involved with the jobs that Pelini and his staff have to do in assembling recruiting classes.

“Once in a while they’ll say, ‘well what’d you think,’ or ‘how did his parents sound’ or whatever… and of course once in a while I do look at a film but not every often,” Osborne said. “There are so many videos, and DVD’s that come through there, that unless somebody says, ‘would you take a look at this particular position’ – I don’t have time to look to sit here and look at 60 videos a day.

Again, please entire article and check out the article.  It really is important to realize how large the recruiting database for any program is that is recruiting athletes.  Just because you get a form letter doesn’t mean much.

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