How Penn State is preparing for the end of the recruiting dead period

In public appearances, it’s commonplace to hear James Franklin or a member of his coaching staff emphasising the importance of relationships within Penn State’s football program.

Those values carry over to recruiting, where, this summer, Penn State’s staff will need to create those relationships with a running clock.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the NCAA has prohibited in-person recruiting activities for over a year. That will end on June 1, when the NCAA ends the dead period until June 28 — putting programs all over the country on a time crunch as they strive to make up for lost opportunity.

“When they’re on campus, the value of connecting with the person is going to be just so much more important than it’s ever been,” Penn State Director of Player Personnel Andy Frank told BWI in a recent, one-on-one interview. “Because if you think about it in percentages, let’s just say your average kid comes on campus 10 times in a normal cycle before he signs with you. Well that gives you 10 opportunities to have those interactions and develop those relationships over time.

“We may have only three or four visits on average for kids that sign with us. So we’ve got to get all of that interpersonal relationship building in a smaller number of visits, so we better spend the time on that.”

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The adaptation by necessity that has taken place over the last year or so for Penn State’s recruiting staff has helped them derive lessons that they can use moving forward.

For example, Penn State thinks it can handle some of the more formal aspects of a typical official visit virtually, whether that occurs before or after the official visit takes place — which will help create more time for recruits to interact with the coaching staff.

There will be fewer powerpoint presentations, and more organic conversations.

“We’ve done a variety of things in the past,” Frank said. “I’ll point to our Lasch Bash, where you go out and you play cornhole, you know, tailgate games, you do things like that, [things] you might not necessarily do on an official visit. You might be more in a dining setting for a meal. We’ll probably do more of the Lasch Bash type of things where it’s a freer, looser, get to know you type of deal.”

Frank said the nervous energy felt by the staff when it seemed like the NCAA was likely to end the dead period has been supplanted by a feeling of excitement.

Penn State released its camp schedule last week, which includes seven events in the 28-day window starting on June 1.

Franklin explained last week that one of the most important aspects of recruiting, in his mind, is limiting mistakes, and the information his staff gathers at these events can go a long way toward helping them do that.

“There’s two ends of recruiting,” Franklin said. “The one end people mostly focus on, which is getting the five-stars or the four-stars. But, just as valuable — like in any other industry — is trying to reduce or eliminate the mistakes. So it’s not just getting the five-star, it’s not taking the wrong four-star, not taking the wrong three-star, or finding the two-star or the three-star that people might not know about, but they’re going to be a five-star in terms of production or a four-star, whatever it may be.”

Members of the Class of 2022 will be the prospects that Penn State — and other schools — will largely miss out on when it comes to camp evaluation, Frank said. Those players, heading into their senior seasons, will be more likely to take official visits during this four-week period than they are to head to camps.

However, Frank said he thinks Penn State will be able to get many important prospects in the Class of 2023 to camp. Alongside the obvious benefit of getting their own testing numbers and generally evaluating a prospect’s athletic ability, it’s also an opportunity to see how they interact with coaches and players, how competitive they are, and other bits and pieces that can contribute to Franklin’s idea of minimizing error.

“If we’re sitting and we’re talking about a prospect and 95 percent of the staff feels great about the kid being able to help us win, we feel really good about the kid,” Frank said. “When it starts to get a little more mixed reviews, then you say, ‘OK, well, what more information do you need to either become sure in favor or sure against?’ I think the condensed nature [of the summer] is going to make getting that information more difficult, but less difficult than it was last year, because we’re going to have camps, we’re going to have individual evaluations.”

Those individual evaluations are new for the Nittany Lions this summer, allowing prospects who take unofficial visits in June and July to work out with the coaching staff.

Frank, who thinks that opportunity will only apply for members of the Class of 2021 and 2022, wasn’t certain on some of the other specifics, such as how long those workouts will last and which coaches prospects will be allowed to work out for, but he does think they’ll help both parties.

“It’s hard to get older kids to come to camp, I think it’s a little bit easier to get them to come to an individual short workout,” Frank said.

“It’s going to be a little bit of a conversation between us and the kids and different schools, does it make sense for the kid to work out? There’s going to be some kids that don’t think that they should, that maybe they should at certain schools. We’re going to want kids to work out so that we can make the best decisions. I always find it sort of interesting. Sometimes kids will get offers, and they don’t want to camp because they don’t want to lose their offers. I would make the opposite argument. To me, if I’m a kid or I’m a parent of a kid, I want my kid to go camp there because I want my kid at the right place.”

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