Coaches And Recruits Don’t Trust Each Other - Why?

College football coaches lie, but so do the players that they are recruiting. 

Everyone agrees that transparency is the single most important factor in the college football recruiting process between coaches, players and families, but no one can seem to agree upon what the definition of transparency is. That's the problem with the English language, after all. Just because we all know the same words, doesn't mean we all hold the same definitions for those words or concepts. 

College coaches inevitably offer more players than they have spots on their roster for knowing full well that they won't get their first choice for a roster spot all the time. Good coaches, when this happens, will communicate clearly with each player at the position they are offering that they are going to commit the first player who says yes to them. Lousy coaches, however, will not do this. When a player takes too long to make their decision or a coach doesn't clearly communicate that there are other players who have been offered the same position and the team goes with another player, a player will feel slighted claiming that a coach lied to them. 

At the same time, recruits themselves speak to more teams than they are going to commit to. After all, you can only play for one college football team at a time. Players and families over market themselves in an attempt to protect themselves when scenarios like above occur. In some cases, families and players use offers from other teams in the conference of the school they really want to go to to create, inflate and leverage coaches' fear of missing out or FOMO. Next time you see one major college football program offer a particular player in their conference, watch as the next few days or weeks, the other teams in the conference usually follow suit. 

There is a deep seated mistrust of coaches towards players and players towards coaches about whether or not the other side is truly telling the other side the full and honest truth about their given recruiting situation. In the age of social media, traditional gatekeepers and authority figures are no longer trusted. In the 1960s we went from four major news stations where everyone liked and listened to Walter Cronkite to in the 2021 going to 7 billion major news stations. Social media creates the illusion that we are all our own expert. You can't trust anyone, and why would you when most people would rather WebMD their illness than go to a legitimate doctor? College football coaches too, I fear, have become casualties of society's larger disillusionment with authority figures' trustworthiness. 

Conversely, coaches don't trust that players or families are always telling them the entire truth either. The knock on Gen Z'ers is that they enjoy the process of being recruited - the hype, the graphics, and most importantly the attention - more than they are actually serious about playing college football. How can a coach truly know if this player is serious about committing to their program or if the hours they have spent scouting and researching this player are just a ploy to leverage your offer into an offer from a college they really want to go to? 

It's never been easy being a young person. To know where you want to go to college you need to know who you are, but the thing most high school seniors don't know is who they are, what they stand for or where they want to go, and it's not their fault. Well intentioned teachers, coaches and parents have more or less spent the previous 15 years prescribing and making all the major life decisions for these high school student-athletes: what to study, where to study, how to study, what to play, how to play it, who to play for. The net sum total impact of this well-intentioned but probably misguided micromanagement is that at the very moment a young person is expected to make their weightiest life decision (college) it is also their first time ever being charged with making a major life decision. 

It's also not easy being a college coach. To college coaches, recruiting is their job - literally. Every time a coach recruits a player they are trusting a portion of their paycheck into the hands of an 18 to 22 year old they've only met over the phone, FaceTime, or in person a few times. A coach putting braces on his child or being told they need to move the whole family to a new school or city because they were fired depends largely on the quality of the performances that their recruits execute. That's a tough way to live. Coaching turnover can be very high some years and, I bet, if you look up the average college coach's bio on their team website you will see many short two or three year stints in their career path. 

And so, round and round we go in a self-perpetuating doom loop. Coaches' trying to preserve their job security and recruits trying to protect themselves from their own insecurity. When a player gets burned, they'll claim a coach lied to them. A coach might counter in return that a player simply misinterpreted the conversation. Trust is the single scarcest commodity in college recruiting, so when you come across a recruit or a coach who shows to be as good as their word cling on as tight as you can.