Recruiting may very well be the hardest part of any college coach's job.
Not only do they have to identify, scout, offer and then form a relationship with a prospect and his family, they also have to keep in mind how many players they want at every position in each cycle based on the needs of their team and potential departures following the season.
Then — to make things even more difficult — some kids want to end their recruitment rather quickly and will commit as soon as the staff gives the green light, while others will hold off until later in the process. But what happens when you already hold a commitment at a certain position but remain very much in contention to land another higher-rated prospect down the line?
“That's a dilemma,” head coach Urban Meyer said during his media availability on Monday afternoon. “Myself and Mark Pantoni — who's our director of player personnel here — have a little overage, and there's certain positions you say, '[We'll] take them no matter what.' When you start talking about offensive and defensive linemen, they're a great player, you're taking them. So we take them.”
But even so, recruiting is a numbers game. You can only take so many players at each position in a single class, even at a premium spot like defensive end.
“That's the calculated risk that you have to take,” Meyer added.
Ohio State entered the week with a pair of pledges at the position in Georgia five-star Brenton Cox and Florida four-star Andrew Chatfield, and remains very much among the favorites to eventually land Pennsylvania five-star Micah Parsons, Cleveland Heights four-star Tyreke Smith and New Jersey four-star Jayson Oweh, as well.
Though it wasn't out of the realm of possibilities for the staff to land all five — as starters Tyquan Lewis and Jalyn Holmes are set to graduate and Sam Hubbard could enter the NFL Draft following a stellar redshirt junior season — it was highly unlikely each would willingly enter such a situation.
So it came as no surprise, then, when Chatfield reopened his recruitment just hours after Meyer's comments. Things had been building toward that since he earned an offer from Florida during his visit for the Gators' rendition of Friday Night Lights nearly three weeks ago, though he said as recently as Saturday he was 100 percent committed to the Buckeyes.
And therein lies one of the many hurdles coaches have to overcome on the recruiting trail. Coaches constantly reevaluate where a commitment stands, and sometimes that leads to tough conversations — though the reason may be different every time.
“We've had — and we've never made that kind of stuff public — but we've had people that all of a sudden miss 29 classes in high school, they get a bad [grade] from an academic report, they get a bad report football-wise,” Meyer said. “And those are conversations that you have — obviously not in the media because that's not fair — but it is what it is.”
The hardest conversation involves the kids, like Chatfield, who fall victim to the numbers game. But in the end, Ohio State gets to pursue the nation's best while Chatfield gets to stay close to home. It seems like a win-win for both sides.
