Solari: Welcome to 2017, football recruiting fanatics
For MSU's coaches, however, their chase for next year's top prospects is well underway
EAST LANSING – Nobody wondered what Punxsutawney Phil was up to Wednesday morning. His day in the early-morning sun came and went a day earlier, with all of the onlookers outside his hole gone a few hours after his decision that winter will soon end.
As daylight arrived on college campuses around the country Wednesday, football coaches eagerly stood around with just as much anticipation for an equally mundane event. For Phil, it’s seeing a shadow or not. For many coaches, it’s hearing a fax machine chime.
Every year, National Signing Day comes and goes like Groundhog’s Day. And then it’s time to begin waiting for next year.
College football turned the page Thursday. Coaches started preparing for spring practice, departing players readying for the NFL draft. Recruits turn into incoming freshmen.
Michigan State’s 2016 recruiting efforts quickly became a distant memory, “one-day news” as coach Mark Dantonio called it. Fans can start looking ahead to the hat dances and extravagant ceremonies for the Class of 2017.
“It’s started already for 2017. I wish I could say tomorrow it will start,” Curtis Blackwell, MSU’s director of college advancement and performance, said Wednesday. “The best thing about it is we’re the furthest away from signing day, so it’s a lot less stressful. But it’s really the process of being able to cast out 2016 and give your undivided attention to 2017.”
Who's next?
In truth, the Spartans’ staff already has been chasing after this year’s high school juniors. For years.
And sophomores. And freshmen. That’s the nature of the beast — recruiting is all about finding the next star, infusing a college program with more and more elite athletes. If you aren’t working ahead that far, you’re already well behind.
Blackwell was hired to head the Spartans’ recruiting efforts on Aug. 2, 2013. His first day of work began the assemblage of the 2016 class with “Spartan Day.”
“Donnie Corley was here on that day, Demetric Vance was here on that day,” Blackwell said Wednesday of two of MSU’s 22 incoming freshmen. “What you see culminating today started three years ago, planting those seeds.”
MSU received a verbal pledge last summer from wide receiver Hunter Rison, who was entering his junior year at Ann Arbor Skyline High and is ranked sixth in the state for 2017 according to Rivals.com. The son of Spartan hall of famer Andre Rison eventually backed away from that extremely early choice and reopened his search process.
The 5-foot-11, 190-pound younger Rison remains one of the prime targets for next year. So are the state’s top five juniors — in ranked order, Donovan Peoples-Jones, Ambry Thomas, Donovan Johnson, Joshua Ross and Antjuan Simmons. All six are four-star recruits, per Rivals.
Receiver Peoples-Jones (6-1, 188) and defensive back Johnson (5-10, 169) are teammates at Detroit’s Cass Tech. Defensive back Thomas (5-11, 165) was a teammate of 2016 MSU early enrollee Donnie Corley at Detroit King. Ross (6-0, 219) at Orchard Lake St. Mary’s and Simmons (6-1, 199) at Ann Arbor Pioneer are both linebackers.
As they have the past few years, the Spartans also will look regionally and nationally for talent. They’ll be tied to a number of top 300 players. They’ll get some. They’ll lose some. They’ll also find some who’ve flown under the radar.
Just like previous years. Just like this year. Because like the movie “Groundhog Day,” recruiting is a repetitive process for college coaches.
Four seasons
It’s a cycle Dantonio and his staff view in four intervals.
The first, Blackwell said, is to get targeted high school juniors to campus for a Spartan football game. That step happened last fall. In the next few weeks, staff will host them for an MSU basketball game now that the 2016 class is in place.
Next, coaches want prospective players to visit MSU's spring practice — which begins March 22 — so they can see how the Spartans’ work behind the scenes. Many will return for the spring game on April 23. Most come with their parents and siblings or high school teammates and coaches.
“You gotta know the person, you gotta know the family. And that’s what coach D allows us to do,” said MSU offensive line coach Mark Staten, who previously served as recruiting coordinator. “That part makes me, makes us as humans, want to be the best we can, because we know we’ve got a lot of people caring about us. And you don’t want to let people down.”
Coaches can call prospects once a week from April 15 to May 31. Then comes a familiar piece for many of the athletes, MSU’s summer football camps in June. Those remain important to identifying individual talent, for 2017 and beyond. For the younger players, it’ll be their introduction to the coaches. For the older ones, it’s their shot to impress them and earn a scholarship.
Once those are done, MSU moves on to preparing for preseason camp and players start readying for their senior seasons. Then the final stages arrive. College coaches can begin calling the players once a week starting Sept. 1. Official visits for football games follow, starting Oct. 15.
“We want to touch on them in four different intervals because we feel like you can see a different side of what it’s like to be a Spartan at every phase,” Blackwell said. “If you can come up in October, come back up in January for a basketball game, come back up in April for the spring game, then come back in June, it’s spaced out. … You get a chance to see a person two or three different times, you know they have a serious interest in you. And you get a chance to get a feel for who they are.”
When the sun rose Thursday, there weren’t many visible shadows as snow fell in mid-Michigan. Winter’s still here. We know from years of meteorological data not to trust a groundhog.
Yet again next year on Feb. 2, we’ll still be waiting for Phil to poke out his head from his hole again. We’ll breathlessly await his eye test, his prognostication.
By that morning, people already will have moved on from National Signing Day. It’s Feb. 1 in 2017.
Contact Chris Solari at (517) 377-1070 or csolari@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @chrissolari