Maybe he was the last of a dying breed.
Utah defensive tackles coach Luther Elliss doesn’t like to think that way, but he knows a story like his son’s may not be written again in Salt Lake City. At least not for a while.
Jonah Elliss was a three-star prospect out of Idaho. He was lightly recruited, but Utah took a chance on his upside, knowing his father’s genes. The only other Power Five schools to offer were Washington State and Louisville. In his first two years, he contributed here and there. But by year three, he hit for 12 sacks and became a third-round NFL draft pick.
If Jonah Elliss would be coming out of high school now, would Utah take the same chance?
Luther Elliss knows the answer is maybe not.
“You want to be a Power Five program and you want to be contending for national titles, you have to find the immediate impact type of guys,” Elliss said this spring as he assessed Utah’s current recruiting strategy. “And honestly, most kids coming out of high school very seldom are the immediate impacts. It’s just the nature of the beast.
“We’re all trying to win. … The best way to get a better batting average [of recruits panning out] is to get proven commodities [in the transfer portal]. Guys who have been there, done that.”
Utah’s approach to roster management has shifted over the last 18 months. What was once a program that prided itself on developing under-recruited players out of high school is now a group looking to milk the transfer portal for all its worth.
It’s good business for a Power Four school. In a time of unlimited transfers, loose NIL contracts and little NCAA stability, the calculation for Kyle Whittingham’s team is simple: If a high school player isn’t a four- or five-star recruit, or high-end talent, maybe look to the portal instead.
“Our business is all about results and performance,” wide receivers coach Alvis Whitted said. “For us, we want to find guys in the portal that have had production, and we can see as a collective group they can help us. … We would be more apt to go after those type of kids than a high school kid for example.”
Whittingham has been hinting, or lamenting, that most power schools would go down this path at some point. When Utah played USC in 2022 — the year Lincoln Riley overhauled the Trojans with 26 transfers and won 11 games — he said it was getting harder to build programs through old-fashioned high school recruiting.
“You saw several teams this year have almost complete 180s because of talent brought in through the portal,” Whittingham said back then. “It has turned into a one-, two-year project [to rebuild].”
Whittingham seemingly adopted that approach this year. Utah only took 15 recruits out of high school. It was the lowest total for the Utes in a decade. At the same time, Whittingham signed 12 transfer additions.
On signing day, he openly admitted the light high school recruiting class was becoming more of the norm. He said he needed to leave room for transfer portal spots or late, high-end high school recruits that could sign in the spring.
“It used to be that 95% of your work was done on signing day,” he said. “But that is not the case anymore.”
For the last decade, Utah averaged 22.6 high school commits per year. The previous low was 17 in 2021.
But Whittingham and his staff saw the rule changes in recruiting, particularly with the removal of most transfer imitations, and figured they had to manipulate their roster differently or get left behind.
Even the most old-school coaches can learn new tricks when winning is on the line.
Whereas Utah used to sign three-star players and hope they developed, now the Utes can almost outsource the development and mitigate the risk. Utah can let that three-star player go to a Group of Five school and develop there. If the prospect hits, Utah could always recruit that player again and bring them in through the portal.
And with the extra roster spaces that cleared, the Utes could sign ready-made transfers who were already proven. It would, in theory, immediately upgrade the depth and the talent. And it would decrease the amount of misses on the roster.
Utah would still recruit high school players, but mostly focus on four- and five-stars (or high-end three-stars). These were players, the Utes think, that are probably the closest to contributing quickly out of high school anyway.
“You got your power schools and, forgive me, but everybody else G5 on down, you’re really a junior college now,” Elliss said. “Because these kids can transfer [out] right.”
In Elliss’ estimation, the rules have created a farm system. The Power Four has the most resources, most NIL and now unlimited access to G5 players to bring them up. Why wouldn’t Utah use that to their advantage?
“You don’t know moving forward what rules and regulations the NCAA is going to continue to put out to make it easier for guys to transfer. That puts a lot more stress on high school kids,” Whitted said. He noted that, “there is always still some merit to developing high school kids,” but the balance of how many prospects is changing. He doesn’t have the exact formula, and it changes year-to-year.
Plus, with the way NIL contracts are structured now, there isn’t much of an advantage of signing a high school player over a transfer portal player in terms of retention. That high school player could also leave after six months just as a portal addition could. So if there is a risk with both, Utah’s staff figured it might as well err on the side of the player who could produce the quickest on the field.
“Hypothetically, we could sign a high school kid this spring and they could say, ‘Hey man, it’s not working I’m leaving.’ Boom,” Whitted said.
Utah’s most recent high school classes have reflected this emphasis on going after just the top-end players and letting other schools gobble up the rest.
Utah signed two four-stars in the last class and eight the year before that. While the volume of recruits isn’t there this year, the average recruit ranking is near the top of the Big 12. Many three-stars Utah is taking are high-end three-stars who are on the fringe of four-star status. There are still some projects, but fewer.
Just looking at Utah’s in-state recruiting, it has focused on the top-five players in the state. Whereas BYU has recruited well from the 10-to-20th ranked players, Utah has signed 12, top-five composite players since 2017.
The No. 1 player in the state has gone to Utah the last two years.
As for what could change this approach, Elliss suggested a potential super league of some kind. “Blow up the system, call it what it is,” he said.
It is possible, in a hypothetical football super league, there would be multi-year NIL contracts and portal guardrails. That would make schools more likely to want to dip back into the high school ranks where they can develop their own players over multiple years and not poach other players so easily.
College football is already slowly moving toward that with the introduction of revenue-sharing and salary caps after the House vs. NCAA settlement last week.
“You can’t blame the kids. It’s free agency. That’s good for them,” Elliss said. “It’s just trying to take the NFL and have free agency every year. There’s no current long-term contracts. There’s one-year deals. Not even one year in reality. It’s a couple months kind of thing. So how long would an NFL team and or the league survive under that kind of structure?”
But until then, Utah is still going to keep going down the transfer portal strategy.
The Utes may not love it, but it is the best business.
