Dominique Robinson navigated the coaches and teammates celebrating on the field at Toyota Stadium and sought out Chuck Martin. The Miami RedHawks had just finished off a 27-14 win over North Texas in the Frisco Football Classic in December, the end to a 7-6 season, and for Robinson the end of an unfathomable career.
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Robinson hugged Martin. He thanked his head coach for believing in him at a time when no other program saw fit to extend an offer.
Martin acknowledges he forgot Miami was the only school to offer Robinson as a 210-pound dual-threat quarterback out of Canton McKinley High School in Northeast Ohio in the Class of 2017.
“But he hadn’t forgotten,” Martin told The Athletic.
Robinson played receiver for three seasons at Miami before moving to defense. Now he’s a 253-pound edge rusher and a possible top-100 pick in the upcoming NFL Draft.
Programs such as Miami have to mine diamonds such as Robinson. They have to look where nobody is looking and not be afraid of pointing bigger programs in the right direction when they unearth a prospect with legitimate potential. Programs on Miami’s level are often the first ones through the door. Not for the no-doubters, the five-star kids who receive offers from the sport’s elite, but for the hundreds of others who fill out college rosters around the country.
There’s a delicate balance there, the fine line between being first — and not fearing being first, really — but also an understanding of what comes with the territory. Martin dealt with that when Miami offered Robinson when he was a high school junior who wasn’t on anyone else’s radar.
“I thought he was a Power 5 kid all along,” Martin said. “I thought he’d blow up and we wouldn’t get him. But we believed in him, we got on him early, and we weren’t afraid to offer him.”
That fear is oftentimes the cost of doing business when recruiting at the Group of 5 level. Early in that process, coaches can find themselves operating without a safety net. Take Robinson, for instance. There was no 247Sports profile touting the kid’s credentials, no blinking lights and arrows directing everyone in his direction. When you’re that early on a prospect, much of that legwork has yet to be done. You’re falling back on instincts, gut feel, years spent honing your evaluation skills and building up the courage over time to trust your eye, even in those instances when what your eyes are telling you runs counter to the consensus.
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There can be an art to it, offering first, offering early, offering a prospect when there’s not an abundance of information out there.
“People are afraid to offer kids who don’t have offers,” a former MAC director of player personnel said. “When someone doesn’t have an offer, you’re looking for a reason for why they don’t.”
How do you get past that?
“I think it depends on the person and how much they trust themselves,” the former personnel director said.
Coaches have a saying in recruiting: “It’s not the players you fail to land who beat you, but the ones you do sign who can’t play.” In other words: Evaluation is the key to success. And that’s especially true at the Group of 5 level, where coaches are searching for specific traits in overlooked prospects.
“Each coach has their profile fit — ideal height, speed, size — for their position,” said UTSA receivers coach Joe Price III, who served as the Roadrunners director of player personnel last year. “I let that profile lead me to the athlete.”
For example, UTSA mines track and field times when scouting receivers. If a receiver runs the 100-meter dash in 11.1 seconds or better, that’s a starting point. Price scours leaderboards on MileSplit, a track and field site that posts meet results, then looks up film for receivers who meet that benchmark to evaluate their football skills.
Once a prospect is deemed offer-worthy, that’s where timing and strategy comes in. But coaches have differing philosophies. Some offer simply so they can say they were first. And there can be value in that down the line. Others might throw offers around with little regard for their significance, the idea being that if you throw enough chum in the water, you’re bound to catch something big. That method doesn’t necessarily require a shrewd eye for talent, but it can be effective.
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Then there’s another way, the one in which you’re more calculated with your offers but don’t hesitate to be first because you truly believe in your evaluation of that particular player. That one is a little trickier, but over time you can build up the skill set to become comfortable in those situations.
“You can go off of experience,” said Perry Eliano, the safeties coach at Ohio State who’s spent time at Cincinnati, New Mexico, Bowling Green, UTSA, Central Arkansas and Sam Houston. “You look for similarities: ‘This guy looks like a guy I recruited, offered or coached before.’”
Yet there still can be a trepidation with offering first.
SMU scouting director Alex Brown, who has also worked at Rice and Houston, has witnessed different approaches.
“There’s some coaches that are like, ‘All right, since he’s local and nobody is on him, let’s recruit him like he’s offered, let’s get him on campus a ton, basically get him to the point that, the minute we offer, this kid is going to jump in the boat. But don’t offer yet because nobody knows about him,’” Brown said.
“Then there’s other coaches who are like, ‘Screw it, we know this kid’s gonna blow up, let’s just chunk it out there.’ And lay out the narrative that, ‘Hey, everybody’s going to follow us, they’ve just been waiting (to see) if someone else will offer them.’”
No matter what stage of his recruitment a prospect is in when you encounter him for the first time, you’re at least partially reliant on the viewpoints of others in formulating your own evaluation. High school coaches, teachers, guidance counselors, trainers — you can’t talk to too many people when trying to find out what a kid is made of.
“You don’t want to be the first to offer if you’re not ready to take a commitment and if you haven’t done the surrounding homework on him,” Brown said. “You can’t take (first offers) lightly.”
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Once you’ve done your homework, you can determine whether he’s worthy of an offer.
That’s a much easier process, however, when a kid is already holding a bunch of offers. When he isn’t, that can create some pause even after you’ve done all that work.
“A lot of places talk about market value,” Martin said, “meaning we don’t have to offer this kid because he doesn’t have any offers. So we’re not behind anyone. I never really understood that. We’re waiting for somebody else to offer him? Then we offer him?”
Rather than operate that way, Martin said he seeks information to understand why his program might like a player whom nobody else seems to be after.
There can be any number of reasons. Maybe that player’s film from his junior season is underwhelming but you saw something at a camp that makes you think the film doesn’t tell the whole story. Perhaps you’re uncertain about the level of competition the recruit plays and how it affects his film. Maybe your staff got out to watch a basketball game or a track meet, and that helps put some athletic traits in better perspective than the film alone can do. Meanwhile, the staff that’s only seen the film isn’t as intrigued. That’s why for some programs, getting live eyes on a prospect is a prerequisite before offering.
Perhaps others aren’t asking enough questions, or aren’t asking the questions that you’d prioritize, or are looking for something different at a given position.
“It’s all part of the process,” Martin said. “Then, to me, you either trust your evaluation or you don’t.”
“I couldn’t care less who has offered them,” North Texas tight ends coach Adrian Mayes said. “I’m going to do my evaluation on the kid and do my best job to get all the background checks done before I go to the school.”
If you’ve followed recruiting long enough, you’ve probably seen it before: a prospect who seems like a Division I no-brainer without any offers. But then that first FBS school breaks the ice, and a flood of others follow. Suddenly, the recruit has “blown up.”
“The first offer always jump-starts your recruitment,” Martin said.
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Eliano said: “At Cincinnati, we knew if we offered, then here it comes. You have to battle that.”
This is where staffs become strategic. There was once a time when they could “hide” prospects. Whether it was keeping offers under wraps or hosting kids on under-the-radar unofficial visits, coaches have done their best to avoid tipping off power programs that may sniff around. That was before recruiting became so social media-centric and recruits posted announcements of every offer they have received.
“The days of hiding guys are gone,” Mayes said. “Twitter, 247, Rivals, they point out all these kids so it’s virtually impossible to hide ’em.”
Services such as Zcruit will send out emails to coaches and personnel departments every day updating the list of players and the offers they’ve received.
“Once you offer someone, it’s on the map,” the former MAC players personnel director said. “That’s the frustrating part.”
That doesn’t mean coaches aren’t still trying. One recruiting staffer told The Athletic that he scouted a player whom he liked in Texas who apparently had no offers. After communicating with the player, he discovered the prospect did indeed have an offer, but the school’s coaches asked him not to announce it on social media in hopes of keeping that prospect off the radar and, thus, increasing their chances of landing him.
If the prospect is at a high school football powerhouse or in a large city that is annually saturated with recruits, he’s likely going to be seen. But if he’s in a remote town that’s not easily accessible from an airport or far from a major city, he might go unnoticed a little longer.
While at Houston, Brown recalled evaluating DeMarvion Overshown, a safety from Arp, an East Texas town with a population of roughly 1,000. Before his junior season, Overshown had zero offers, but Brown loved what he saw on film.
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The Houston staff hosted him on a visit, and after seeing him in person it was clear that he had the body type the coaches sought. But with Overshown holding no offers, the Cougars chose to slow-play the process hoping not to tip others off. It worked out, sort of.
When then-Houston head coach Tom Herman and several assistants left late that November to go to Texas, the Longhorns became the first Power 5 team to offer Overshown. A host of other schools followed, but Texas landed Overshown’s commitment the next May and his signature in the early signing period.
Slow-playing the process is a risk that can pay off, but if a player blows up, it can backfire. If the prospect is local and schools from other areas flock to offer and the local school hasn’t, area high school coaches start to question why.
“The one thing I don’t wanna do is I definitely don’t want to be last,” Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire said.
One thing that has changed some coaches’ calculus on first offers: the transfer portal. Some Group of 5 programs are less skittish about jumping out in front because they want the recruit to remember them if the player chooses a Power 5 school but later decides to transfer.
“In the age of the transfer portal, we may have a leg up on another school here because we established a relationship through recruiting first,” Price said.
Said Mayes: “I don’t care if they’ve got (an) Alabama (offer), I’m going to offer ’em so they know that if they ever want to come to North Texas, I have a previous relationship with them.”
Martin didn’t offer Robinson with that kind of long game in mind, nor did he feel at the time that Miami would ultimately be the landing spot. Robinson had too many raw traits to stay under the radar, or so the Miami staff thought. The hope was that getting in early would make the difference. Perhaps it did. An early offer led to an early commitment, and Robinson opted to shut his recruitment down and not take any visits during his senior year.
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Had that happened, Martin wouldn’t have lost sleep. That’s the game, after all.
Even if it is your offer that ultimately puts a player on the map and sets him on a path to be a star somewhere else, there can be value in that.
“It gives you conviction in what you’re seeing and allows you, when those situations pop up, to use those experiences to explain why you see what you see,” the former MAC personnel director said.
And sometimes the early work — and the willingness to be the first one to extend an offer — pays off in a major way.
“I’ve been in that room where every coach likes him, but nobody wants to use their spot on him because he’s never played that position,” Martin said. “Dominique was one where we didn’t care. He was a great athlete, great human being, great student, high character, unbelievable work ethic. It was going to work itself out. And it did to a great extent, for him and for us.”
(Top photo of Dominique Robinson: Keith Gillett / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)