UK football notebook: How coaches go about finding Cats
- Thread starter wildcatman26
- Start date
I don't know how many "support staff" members UK has in the program, but a couple of years ago Bama was at 40+ and then their on 10 on field coaches. Supposely all that 40+ did was look at film and when a majority agree on a kid the on field staff got to see his tapes and decided if he deserved an offer or not. Those 40+ are all former high school coaches trying to get into coaching college and took this job to get their foot in the door. Jeremy Pruitt, UGA's ex DC and current Bama DC became a college coach with this method. Billy Napier, Bama's current top recruiter and WR coach was hired by Bama when he was fired from Clemson for a couple of years until he got an on field opportunity. UGA has increased their support staff since Smart was hired and has 2 former Bama support staff as on field coaches now.
The cost of having that many people is expensive but Bama takes zero shortcuts when it comes to funding their football program and are reaping the rewards of it right now. Its hard to say they aren't the top program in the country, but they are spending more than anyone to be there, except maybe Oregon who has 12 different looks every year, well they are probably compted but you get the idea.
That support staff streamlines the evaluation process and keeps the on field staff from having to look at 1000's of highlight tapes, probably cuts it down to 250 and lets the coaching staff spend more time evaluating that 250 and on the road recruiting them. In basketball, I doubt college coaches spend much time at high school games looking at 2, maybe 3 guys when they can hit the AAU tournaments and see dozens at once. Mostly likely can see them when things are going well, not going so well, how hard they play under both conditions and see their attitudes. Highlight tapes don't show all of those.
I posted a thread on here recently about the Bama athletics profit last year, IIRC it was about $40,000,000, and the rest of the athletic department lost $20,000,000. So the best football program in the nation cleared about $60,000,000 and the best basketball program in the nation (us) cleared about a tenth of that about five years ago.
Hard to believe, tried to look it up but the article search on here is useless to me, (I even knew the author) and couldn't find it, I won't repeat what I remember the total coaching salaries were because it is unbelievable, but maybe not if they have 40 extra coaches.
lot more HS coaches getting an opportunity to get into college coaching because of this. Our recently hired RB coach was Isiah Crowell's coach in HS, got hired by Auburn as a support staff person, then to Georgia Southeren for a couple of years then our RB coach. I am sure being as connected to the HS coaches in Georgia had a great deal to do with his hiring. He was a founding member of Georgia's minority coaches association and is very well known and liked in the metro Atlanta and Columbus areas. In fact we have 2 coaches on staff who got into the college ranks via that route.