College football coaches prepare for a hectic month of recruiting

The extended dead period in recruiting finally lifted at the beginning of June after being in place for more than a year. This means that coaches can start traveling to see players again, but more relevant to this time of year, it means the players can visit schools and attend camps.

Given all the pent-up energy, college coaches are expecting this to be an incredibly hectic month—Ohio State, for example, is expecting about 50 official visitors in June, which is as many as it would normally have over the course of an entire recruiting cycle.

Bruce Feldman and Ari Wasserman of The Athletic spoke to a number of different coaches and support staff about what lies ahead this summer.

“The 2022 class skipped the unofficial visit process,” the Big Ten recruiting coordinator said. “It was all done on Zoom. So now they can get visits, they already have their top groups and just want to get out and see places. These kids have known for a long time where they want to official visit. In the past, they would maybe take a few in the spring and then gather more information and take a few more in the fall. These guys are completely overloaded with information because they haven’t gotten off the phone with coaches in a long time. They are looking for answers now that can only be found by seeing places, so they are going to do it. Nobody wants to wait any longer.”

This is usually when recruiting picks up anyway, because it’s camp season—NC State will be hosting camps throughout the month, giving its staff the first opportunity to evaluate prospects in person in a long time. This year, these camps may be bursting at the seams, so it’s a lot to manage. And that’s aside from official visits, which are a different animal entirely.

Historically, we see a little run of commitments to NC State this month, so it’ll be interesting to see how this chaos-energy-infused June compares to the normal ones of the past.