USC Recruiting Strategies

April 10, 2009

University of Southern California head coach Pete Carroll has come up with a unique, yet simple way to counter moves by other programs like UCLA, Arizona State, and Notre Dame, who, in the past, heavily targeted recruits that announced early commitments to the Trojans football program.

Rather than immediately announcing a decision to verbally commit to USC, Carroll is apparently instructing many of his high-caliber recruits to "remain silent for awhile," such that the Trojans' recruiting efforts are allowed to continue without harassment while other programs -- this year, for instance, the Texas Longhorns, Alabama Crimson Tide, Florida, Louisiana State, and Michigan -- vie for the national spotlight with what Matt Hinton describes as "unprecedented early efforts" in snatching up a large number of verbal commitments.

The move toward keeping quiet, Hinton writes in an article for Yahoo! Sports, isn't exactly a new ploy; Florida State, he notes, for instance, was well-known for utilizing a similar approach in the nineties in which early year disappointments in landing highly-touted players generally ended up yielding a "top of the rankings" class on National Signing Day.

Yet, the national recruiting scene has changed dramatically over the last ten years, with "mega-programs" like Texas, Florida, and, yes, even USC holding a position of influence strong enough to lure top-named verbal commitments to other programs toward reconsidering where they might end up playing collegiate football. Hinton notes that Carroll and the Trojans learned firsthand just how prominent such practices have become, this year alone losing three early signees to the program -- Vontaze Vurfict, Randall Carroll, and Morrell Presley -- to both the Bruins and the Sun Devils, and "uncommitted but widely presumed Trojans" Menti Te'o (Notre Dame) and Xavier Su'a Filo (UCLA) ultimately landing elsewhere as well.

This being the case, and as Scott Wolf of the Daily News pens in his blog on InsideSoCal.com, it should come as no surprise that Carroll and the rest of his coaching staff intend to keep quiet on the status of those players they are most interested in having sign to play football in Los Angeles. "A few will go public," Wolf writes, "but others will be under the radar because USC does not want 10-12 kids out there committed" as a consequence of "a flurry of public commitments."