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Mike Gundy’s Recruiting (Part 6) – Walking the Path of an OSU Recruiter

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This is Part 6 of a six-part series on Oklahoma State recruiting that explores the relationships, the connections and the gold mines Mike Gundy has gone to over and over again in his time in Stillwater, USA.

Part 1 — The Road Map
Part 2 — Prospect Perspective
Part 3 — Hotspots in Recruiting
Part 4 — Play the Hits
Part 5 — Why Non-Traditional Recruiting Works

Four schools in three days, 13 hours and more than 700 miles apart was the task.

The schedule was set about a week in advance, and not a minute could be spared. Not because I wanted to run a tight ship. Because I physically could not make it to every interview if there was any delay whatsoever.

That is the life of an Oklahoma State recruiter, and they live it every day. I lived it for just a few, and I wanted to recount that drive for you here.

City Streets for Hay Bales

Driving south out of Dallas, six-lane highways turned to four, then to two.

The hour and a half drive to Corsicana, Texas, is not particularly safe from the Metroplex. There is a lot of construction, indicating the ever-continuing growth of the area. The shoulders on the sides of Interstate-40 were clean shaven, and the drivers were as Texan as you might expect.

Navarro Junior College was stop No. 1, a two-year school that had produced four Oklahoma State football players, most notably Calvin Barnett in 2012.

Barnett was committed to Arkansas but became ineligible, so the coaches in Fayetteville tried to send him to Northeastern State, a Division II school in Tahlequah. Navarro coach Cody Crill saw talent and knew there was no chance Barnett would ever make it to D-1 if he went to lower-division university.

There have only been 20 players that have come to OSU from such colleges since Mike Gundy became coach, and none of them were offered scholarships to transfer. So Barnett went to Corsicana and subsequently went to Stillwater.

Driving into town there, you’re more likely to see a hay bale than a building. There is little, if any, advertising along the highway for Navarro. It’s not necessarily a place of interest, particularly for those who go there. The highway signs give drivers hope of something better with cities like Houston and Dallas taunting them to the north and south. But for those who stay, that’s all it is, a taunt.

Once in town, about 6:30 in the evening, it’s a fine place. Crill was a pleasure to work with for the time we talked. The campus was definitely junior college pretty but pretty nonetheless. I asked Crill where I should eat, and he recommended Chili’s. So the business was booming, and much like the players there, I was ready to go, there was still plenty of driving to do through the night.

The Cam Factor

There are two Blinn College campuses, a fact I assume few people know because even I did not.

The most well-known is the campus in Bryan, Texas. It sits in the sidecar of the motorcycle that is College Station and serves as a feeder school to Texas A&M, but that’s not where the Bucaneers play football. That’s in Brenham, Texas, about an hour and a half to the southeast, where there is much less to do other than football.

OSU has signed three players from Blinn, including defensive end Tralund Webber in 2016. It’s one of Gundy’s most frequent junior colleges.

The city is worse, but the campus is better. Cam Newton played at Blinn, but there is no indication that a school exists until you drive into it on a Saturday morning. Advertising is not needed.

“I get phone calls daily about people watching the 30-for-30 on Cam Newton,” Blinn coach Kevin Mahon said. “The recruiting is already done at that point because people already know. You could say, ‘San Mateo (College),’ they couldn’t point to it on a map, but you say, ‘Blinn College,’ and because of Cam Newton and the people before him, he makes instant credibility to this college.”

Downtown Dreams

Even with the windows rolled up, the humidity thickened as I drove south into Houston that Saturday afternoon.

Without hearing anyone speak, I could almost feel the drawl go from Southern to Coastal, almost Cajun, and mansions with palm trees lining the driveways started appearing on the sides of the highway. But once you get to the southeast part of Houston, miles from the Gulf of Mexico, where Bobby Reid is from, the demographic changes again.

The most densely populated part of Galena Park, outside of North Shore High School is the shopping center at Wallisville and Uvalde roads. The parking lot was filled to the back rows outside of Goodwill, Family Dollar, Impress For Less and Joe V’s Smart Shop.

Down the road is San Jacinto Junior College, and North Shore is across the street. Half a mile from there, million-dollar houses pack into billion-dollar neighborhoods. Assistant coach Steve Lewis said it’s such a big deal when coaches like Gundy take visits.

“It gives those kids who are less fortunate a chance to see beyond the walls here,” Lewis said.

Eating With the King

Alief High School on the westside and Cibolo Steele in San Antonio were supposed to come next, but those coaches either did not respond to emails about establishing interview times or had last-minute engagements and had to cancel.

The drive from Houston back to Dallas is brutal. Texas is just small enough to drive through it in one day and keep your sanity but just big enough to tempt you to fly. I assume Gundy’s assistants mostly do the former.

But once you get to DeSoto, a suburb on the southside of Downtown Dallas, the drive melts away. The hills are uncharacteristic of the landscape, and the scenery is unexpected given the industrialization around it, but the football is as strong as it gets in Texas, and Gundy is no stranger.

As you have read by now, OSU has signed six players from DeSoto High School since 2005. No high school pipeline has been more popular for Oklahoma State. Pros like Von Miller and former Cowboy Tatum Bell have come from the program, and the connection has come to life again with three signatures since 2014, including Chris Lacy.

Lacy said he has some bias but thinks the talent is the denominator why Gundy keeps coming back for more and success is the reason DeSoto keeps sending them, and that’s hard to argue. Coach Todd Peterman and his squad have lost fewer games than Alabama since the start of the 2016 season, despite playing at the highest level of Texas high school football.

“I don’t blame ‘em,” Lacy said.

Final Thoughts

There were many more interviews and locations I went to during the past few months.

I talked with childhood heroes like J.W. Walsh and Josh Stewart, men as far as Marvin Danzler in Louisville, Kentucky, and those as unknown as Brad Ballard at tiny Tuttle High School. The journey was strenuous and more tiresome than I imagined it would be when it began.

Ballard told me he has the utmost respect for college recruiters. Their days are filled as soon as they find out they have one or two off, and even if they don’t have an off day, they’re likely to catch a game every Thursday and Friday night in a different part of America.

When Ballard was young, his dad was a high school coach in Oklahoma. OSU recruiters didn’t have a lot of the modern technology, so they had to go to every school, even the tiny school Ballard’s dad coached at.

His dad would tell the recruiters, “Well, we don’t have anybody.”

“That’s all right,” the recruiters would tell him. “I wanted to come by and see you, make sure you know I’m here.”

It’s not that way anymore. Assistant coaches can almost algorithmically pinpoint which schools will result in the most return on investment and shoot for those, but because recruiting has grown into more of a business model than a tongue-in-cheek “game within the game,” the schedules are still so tight.

As I drove throughout Texas and Oklahoma, I felt that. The pedal got pushed maybe a little too hard for the officers’ liking, but you have to make it. Walsh told me during recruiting season, he goes to at least five schools a day. I went to four in a weekend.

J.W. called it fun. I call it amazing.

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