Texas' Big Recruiting Wins Come Despite Lack of In-Person Contact

The living room visit has long been a staple of big-time college recruiting.

It's an opportunity for a coach to step into a player's home and use his charisma to its fullest extent, convincing players that their time will be best spent under his tutelage and parents that their son is in good hands.

For the past six weeks all of those visits have been off the table. The NCAA has barred face-to-face contact for players since mid-March with hard date on when they will return. That has forced coaches to adapt quickly.

"It's kind of status quo," Herman said regarding recruiting. "We would have had unofficial visitors on our campus, obviously, watching spring practice and scrimmages and whatnot, but the level of communication has not diminished. We're still in constant communication with those guys."

One might think under these new rules, the objective is to maintain contact and buy time until social distancing measures are relaxed a bit and players and coaches are allowed to be in each other's presence again, but this past week the Longhorn staff has shown it's not just treading water in these new times.

Texas is in the middle of its most successful week of recruiting of the calandar year so far, in fact. The Longhorns staff has not only adapted to the new rules, but are learning to thrive.

"I think one of the things that has really helped us old guys at least is you realize that FaceTime and Zoom and some of these different features that allow you face-to-face contact," if you will, they're pretty cool," Herman said.

In six days' time the Longhorns got commitments from three-star tight end Landen King and four-star defensive lineman Jordon Thomas from the 2021 class. They also secured graduate transfer Tarik Black from Michigan and added a late piece to the 2020 class in former Baylor signee Jahdae Barron.

"You can get a lot done and the conversations seem to go much smoother or least more in-depth when you can see someone's facial response and their reaction and nonverbal communication, too," Herman said. "I think we're certainly using those more in place of just telephone calls, if you will, but other than the in-person, on-campus visits, the communication level as has been the same."

Nobody knows for sure when we'll see some degree of normalcy return to the world of college recruiting, but Longhorn fans should be happy knowing this staff isn't just sitting around and waiting for that to happen, they are attacking the current situation and making the most of all available resources.

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