Sharrieff Shah has been in the recruiting business long enough that he can anticipate the negative tactics that will be used against his school.
“Oh, you don’t want to go to Utah,” the Utes’ cornerbacks coach said incredulously, launching into his best impersonation of opposing coaches. “It’s bad out there. … It’s so far.”
He paused and laughed at his hypothetical recruiting pitch for a second.
Shah can laugh because he knows the state and the program’s strengths. But for recruits who have never seen Salt Lake City, the thought of moving to the mountains — away from the recruiting hotbeds in Texas, Florida and California — can be daunting. And opposing coaches like to prey on that.
“Everyone else will say, ‘Utah is the LDS population. It’s this. It’s that,’” running backs coach Quinton Ganther concurred. “We are fighting all types of uphill battles, but we are fighting them.”
For the longest time, Utah’s answer to the negative recruiting war was to get players on campus. Let them see it for themselves. Even that has become more difficult, Shah and Ganther said.
Since the introduction of name, image and likeness, Utah coaches are finding it harder and harder to get recruits to come on unofficial visits. Coaches believe many top recruits are charging a fee just to visit. Recruiting and NIL experts say that is against the rules. But some Ute coaches feel, it is a reality that is making recruiting more challenging.
“It is a lot harder to get a kid to come unofficially,” Shah said. “That’s for sure.”
Thirteen years as the cornerbacks coach at Utah, filled with hundreds of hard-fought recruiting battles, will harden a coach. It will also refine a recruiting pitch, forcing you to nimbly predict what other programs will use against you and turn it into a strength.
Unofficial visits are key to building relationships with recruits, Shah said.
Each recruit is supposed to pay their way to the school on unofficial visits, where they can see the campus, and speak with players and coaches.
Then recruits lay the groundwork for setting up a handful of official visits before making a final choice.
The official visit is where the school can really roll out the red carpet. The school can pay for flights, hotels, food and sell a vision. But you have to get on a recruit’s official visit list for that to happen.
“[Unofficial visits are] huge,” Shah said, talking about Utah’s strategy. “You need to get here. Come see it. Every kid with reservations from another state, when they get here they say, ‘Man, I didn’t know Utah was like this. Utah is awesome. I didn’t know it was the city, the players, the coaches and the level of football and the offenses we get to go up against.’”
But now, coaches believe recruits are being paid NIL money to go on unofficials. And schools that don’t pay the going rate, won’t get as many opportunities to impress prospective student-athletes.
“Depends on where the kids comes from,” Ganther said of how much the going rate is now. “Because unofficial visits, like we can’t pay for those. Those are kids supposed to be on their own. But when a kid is going on 20 unofficial visits …
“That is just how the game is right now. I don’t have many unofficial visits for running backs, if that lets you know anything. I don’t have a lot of unofficial visits.”
Bill Carter, a University of Vermont lecturer who teaches about NIL, said a third-party NIL collective paying a recruit for an unofficial visit would be against the rules. It would be considered an inducement, something outlawed in the NIL space.
“It’s not allowed, right?” Carter said. “What’s allowed is the school to pay for travel, hotel, meals, tickets [on official visits]. There’s almost hardly anything outside of that allowed.”
Still, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Carter said NIL has seeped into almost every step of the recruiting process — especially with high-end prospects being recruited by multiple SEC schools. It drives the market price up as they compete against themselves.
And in this example, it might even cost Utah more to garner a visit from a high school player being sought after by SEC schools.
“If it’s costing Ole Miss $10,000 to get that kid on campus, then is that kid going to do the same visit to Utah for $10,000? No,” Carter said.
It becomes a case of Utah fighting over four- and five-star recruits with the top schools in the country, when it does not have the same war chest or inherent easy selling points.
“You don’t need to be on the campus at Notre Dame if they make an offer, you want to go there,” he said. “... It’s that half-step down [program] outside of the, say, the top 15 programs in the country [that are fighting for visits and players]. They’re fighting like hell. They are fighting the recruiting battles every day to get some kids not to go to those top 15 schools.”
Carter noted NIL rules aren’t being enforced because of a federal court injunction. So even though inducements for visits are against the rules, there is nothing the NCAA can do about it at the moment.
There is some hope, Carter said. Last year, the NCAA did lift the restriction on the number of official visits a recruit can go on. In theory, that decreases the value of unofficial visits.
But just because a player has an unlimited amount of visits, it doesn’t mean they will come to every school. Players are still selective about which schools get a final audience, in many cases predicated on previous relationships and past visits. And the dollar value in the NIL space to get on campus still matters.
It makes Utah’s job more difficult.
“The kids you are competing with, you have to get them on campus,” Ganther said. “Because if you don’t get them on campus, you’ll never get them. … You have no shot.”
