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On Texas Football: A look behind the curtain as Jake Langi gets underway at Inside Texas 

Steve Habelby: Steve Habel02/19/23stevehabel
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Moro Ojomo (courtesy of Jake Langi)

In the latest edition of On Texas Football, Bobby Burton welcomes new Inside Texas staff member Jake Langi, former player personnel analyst under Tom Herman and Steve Sarkisian, to the fold and picks his brain on his former role on the Longhorns staff, on if star ratings matter and some other Texas football info.

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Langi is a key addition to the Inside Texas staff, with his insight gained from time spent in recruiting and player evaluation an aspect that will help IT’s subscribers better understand the process. He told Burton the specifics about his role at Texas.

“I kind of evaluated everybody except for QBs,” Langi explained. “I’ve always stayed away from QBs. Head coaches tend to like really be hands on especially if they have a quarterback background. But just by default, I kind of became the O-line, D-line guy because not many of the recruiting guys had background in the trenches.”

In Sarkisian’s system each coach has a recruiting guy with him. 

“So basically I helped to filter through the number of recruits that they’re supposed to look at,” Langi said. “In my last year with Texas, which was 2021, I was with (defensive coordinator) Pete Kwiatkowski. So I evaluated the edges.

“I would have 20 guys to look at, you know, in one day, the only ones that I would take to PK, you know, might only be three of them, because the rest of them maybe didn’t fit what he did or didn’t quite have the size/athleticism combo that he was looking for.”

“They get together once, maybe twice a week to look over guys. And from there, the coach would give him a ranking. If he was elite, he was basically given a number ranking and given straight to Sark. Or, you know, it might be like, ‘hey, let’s continue evaluating this guy. He still needs to grow, or we need to get the guy in the camp. See what he looks like, or maybe hold off for now.’”

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Burton asked if “stars” matter from a recruiting analyst perspective. Langi said that the players ranked with four or five stars still have to pass the eye test.

“We still have to trust our own eyes,” Langi said. “You know, and the coaches have to rate them how they see fit and then how they fit our scheme in our system. But I think it’s pretty obvious with the five stars, you know, they already have the prototypical size/athleticism combination.”

There’s plenty of more info on the video, with Langi telling us which players are the easiest to predict success with, a story about the recruitment of Moro Ojomo, and how being a Polynesian player (and coach) helped him recruit.

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