Deion Sanders explains why he doesn't do in-home visits with recruits
Deion Sanders has made no bones that he’s going to do things differently on the recruiting trail as Colorado’s head coach.
And the Buffs’ second-year head coach has not shied away from that — or his discussing his particular strategies for building a program. That includes why his team primarily recruits players in the transfer portal and more controversially, what he looks for in certain players. The man who dubbed himself ‘Coach Prime’ is one of one, and he looks at the recruiting process differently than most coaches as well.
Last week, USA Today published a story that claimed Sanders had not done a single in-home visit with a recruit, something head coaches typically do right before the Early Signing Period in December and then again before the second signing period in February.
It is the final time a coach sees a recruit before they sign, and it gives them a chance to make a last pitch — whether they’re trying to land an uncommitted prospect, flip a committed one or prevent one of their own commits from being flipped.
By contrast, former Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh had 145 off-campus contacts with recruits or their family members from Dec. 1, 2022 until he left for an NFL job earlier this year, according to the data obtained by USA TODAY.
Sanders, however, doesn’t think there’s value in that for his program. And he believes parents of recruits feel that way as well.
“I really truly in all my heart believe, parents don’t want me at their house,” he said to reporters in response to the article on Wednesday. “They want to come see my house. They want to see how I live, how I get down. They want to see what I’ve got going on, what God has done in my life.”
Sanders believes times have changed, recruits have different priorities
Sanders also reflected on his own experience as a high school recruit, when he didn’t want Florida State head coach Bobby Bowden to come by his home because of its condition.
“I know when I was in college, I did not want Bobby Bowden in my house,” he added. “Because I knew after 7:00, it was going to be rats and roaches on parade doing their thing. That was just straight up, honestly I didn’t So that never transpired, that never happened for me.”
Similar to how differently he views visits than the majority of coaches, Sanders’ approach to roster-building is a drastic change from other programs. In less than two years at the helm in Boulder, he has brought in 75 transfers and completely overhauled one of the worst rosters in the Power Five conferences. In his first recruiting class, he took 22 commitments. This past cycle, he took only eight — one of whom was five-star offensive tackle Jordan Seaton.
And to him, transfers don’t have the same priorities that high school recruits do.
“We target mostly guys in the portal. When do you make visits to portal guys’ homes? Anybody do that? Have you guys heard of that?” he asked. “I think when a guy is in his 20s and he has one or two more shots, he doesn’t give a darn about the picture [with me]. He doesn’t give a darn about the parade you want to take him on. He wants to know, ‘How can you use me, how can you get me to the league and what am I going to get paid?’ That’s it. That’s the world we live in now. I’ve never heard one guy say ‘I chose this college because this coach came by my crib.'”