How a change within NC State’s recruiting office helped in the transfer portal

NC State coach Dave Doeren knows first-hand how challenging it can be to balance recruiting and coaching. He did it for the first 16 years of his career before he landed the head coaching job at Northern Illinois, and in Raleigh two years later.

He started his college coaching career at Drake in the FCS ranks, where resources are limited and recruiting falls on the entire staff. Doeren eventually coached defensive backs at Montana after the turn of the millennium, which then took him to Kansas. 

When Doeren arrived at Kansas, he coached linebackers, but another title was added to his office door: recruiting coordinator. That stuck with him when he arrived at Wisconsin four years later. 

“That was part of my side gig, I guess,” Doeren said. “I was coaching a position, but I was the recruiting coordinator. So I oversaw all that — our mailings, our calling schedule and everything.”

But when Doeren took the job at NC State in 2013, he began to build a recruiting department within his program. It started as a one-man office, but has since grown to a unit with more than half a dozen full-time employees that are divided into three branches to streamline the process. 

NC State’s front office now has three departments that function like an NFL team. It is split with a scouting department, a recruiting department and a personnel department. Each piece has its own role and Andy Vaughn, the Wolfpack’s general manager for football, oversees the operation. 

The scouting and personnel departments evaluate and identify talent that NC State should offer. Once that happens, the recruiting office goes to work to get a player on campus. It’s a professional department that is dedicated to not only helping get a player on campus, but once he does arrive on a visit, to make it the best experience possible. 

NC State goes through a prospective recruit’s social media to find their interests, from their favorite foods to what they do outside of football. The whole goal is to tailor a trip to Raleigh specifically for each recruit or transfer target. Or as Doeren put it, “It’s not a cookie-cutter thing. … You’d be foolish not to try to do that.”

“I always tell our staff this, every time someone steps on campus, it could be the last time they come,” Doeren said. “If we don’t do our jobs, they might never come back here, so we have to treat it that way. Each visit is a critical visit and we take a lot of pride in that. We don’t always hit the mark, but we certainly try.”

The new approach has proved to be effective for NC State. It signed 24 players in the early signing period, which was Doeren’s highest-rated class since he arrived in 2013. Not only has it worked at the high school level, but it has helped with the transfer portal, a key reason the coach decided to implement the new way of doing things. 

It’s a more NFL-like approach, one that Doeren implemented a year ago to revamp the department after he felt like the Wolfpack was “completely unprepared for things that happened.”

What was NC State behind the eight ball on? The transfer portal. 

By the time NC State reached out to players it was interested in, they already had a top list of schools. Something had to change, and Doeren went to work. 

NC State’s new goal was to identify the portal targets that it would be interested in before the player entered, rather than waiting until after they did. The personnel office tracks various players around college football that could potentially end up at NC State, whether that’s because they’re from the area or the team offered those players in high school.

Sure that creates extra work by not knowing which player may or may not go into the NCAA’s wild west of recruiting, but the Pack wanted to be prepared. 

It was not a year ago, but this time around, Doeren is pretty confident in its success. 

“I think the results are obvious,” Doeren said.

NC State has gained eight public commitments from transfer portal targets, which include the No. 1 tight end (UConn’s Justin Joly), the No. 3 running back (Duke’s Jordan Waters), the No. 4 center (Notre Dame’s Zeke Correll), the No. 16 quarterback (Coastal Carolina’s Grayson McCall) and the No. 24 wide receiver (Wake Forest’s Wesley Grimes), according to the On3 Industry Portal Rankings.

The new way of doing things in Raleigh helped with the portal. Not only because the Wolfpack currently boasts the No. 7 portal haul, according to On3, but also because it allowed NC State’s assistants to focus on the final stretch of the season. 

“We did a lot of background for the what-if’s in that office,” Doeren said. “That kept the coaches in the booth of coaching, and it really helped our staff not feel like we were running around with our heads cut off. We had a very detailed and organized group. They did a great job cutting a lot of that leg work out so we could focus on the guys we wanted to recruit once they hit the portal.”

NC State finished the season on a five-game winning streak and will play in the Pop-Tarts Bowl next week, while it landed several instant-impact transfers the team can use to build on the momentum of this season.

The new approach worked, and Doeren championed NC State’s ability to learn from the past and to make adjustments for the future.

“You can complain about it all you want or you can adapt, and that’s what we’re choosing to do here at NC State,” Doeren said. “We want to be the best at evolving in this space, and we’re trying really hard to do so. I think we’re having great success, to be honest.”