U-M Recruiting Director Matt Dudek Gives Insight On Orchestrating A Class
In college football, many coaches will tell you recruiting is the lifeblood of their program. It's a daily part of the job for a coach, but especially for a man who has "recruiting" in his job title. U-M Director of Recruiting Matt Dudek joined Jon Jansen on his "In The Trenches" podcast this morning and discussed the nuances of recruiting, as the early signing day on December 18 looms near.
Dudek has been on staff at U-M since July of 2017. He came from Arizona, where he was college football's first General Manager.
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Once the regular season ends, things don't wind down for the coaching staff, and certainly not for Dudek, as he is orchestrating a new wave of players to join the Wolverines.
"I think it’s a bit of mayhem, and this is across college football," Dudek explained. "It’s not just here at Michigan. You finish the regular season. You have two weeks of contact, starting December 1st. It’s the first time that coaches can speak to recruits and parents off campus. That’s where you get the home visits, and you can go to the movies (you can’t pay for the kid to go to the movies). You can go to the schools and talk to the kids. It becomes that off-campus contact, so [we] set up all of those, and official visits for the two weekends you can have them, making sure you get the information for their national letters of intent. It’s a lot of on the phone. I’m mainly in the office at this time. I do travel with coach some of these days, but primarily, I’m on my phone, talking to the 11 coaches, from everything about, ‘Where’s my hotel? Who else did we offer in this school? What’s his coach’s phone number?’ All of those different things are going on."
Another challenge is balancing the constantly changing rulebook that the NCAA has in place.
"The compliance office does a great job here," Dudek said. "[Executive Senior Associate AD and Chief Student Development and Compliance Officer] Elizabeth [Heinrich] and her team do an incredible job of letting us know [of rule changes] — there’s usually some new rule proposals that come out in January. Then, they vote on them in April, and some go immediately in effect, some go into effect August 1st, some go into effect December 1st. Sometimes, they’re the complete opposite of what the rule used to be. Sometimes, they’re through the AFCA, the coach’s association.
"Here’s a great example — official visits up until probably five or six years ago — you could have an official visitor on campus. You weren’t allowed to pay for his parents to travel. So, the kid could come and you could pay for his travel, you could pay for his hotel room, you could pay for his meals but once the parents got to the location, you could pay for their room but not their plane ticket, bus service, train ticket. Kids, often times earlier in my career, were coming by themselves. Making the biggest decision of their lives, because their parents couldn’t afford to come."
Dudek says the communication between recruiting staffs and the rule makers has increased in recent years.
"I think it’s grown a lot over the last five years," he said. "They do a personnel symposium now, where all the recruiting guys and operations folks get together. It’s like a convention. They do that in August. The Big Ten, we get together, all the recruiting guys, all the operation guys, we get together in April or May for a little talk.
"We’re always talking to our compliance offices. That’s where the rules stem from. And then, as they’re writing a rule or proposal and knowing that Ohio State’s good with this, Penn State’s good with this, Illinois’ is good with this — and then we’re writing this as a conference, as opposed to Michigan thinks this is best or Penn State thinks this is best. Once you get everybody on board, it’s not a competitive advantage. Often times, it’s an advantage for the kids, making it simplified for the coaches or making it simplified for the actual recruits. That’s really where a lot of those [rule changes] stem from."
As far as U-M's recruiting class, Dudek explained the nuances of how many a team can sign in a given year.
"Overall, you get 85 scholarships," Dudek began. "And then, there’s some they call an initial scholarship, where you’re allowed to have 25 a year. People were manipulating that and how the rule was written, so they put a new rule in place called the ‘hard cap.’ That’s 25 actual signatures to paper per year. 25 actual signatures is actually pen to paper, you can only sign 25 guys. Now, if you didn’t use your 25 the year before, and you have an initial scholarship to go with it, you could sign 26. There’s schools in that position to be able to get 27 or 28, depending on what you signed in last year’s class. That’s kind of the target of where you’re at, and for us, I’ll keep that close to the vest. We’re somewhere in between that."
With the changing landscape of college football, and the rise in prevalence of transfers, it's a balancing act with how to put together a full team of scholarship players.
"You always try to hold back one or two [scholarships]," Dudek said. "You’re never going to turn away a great player, a great freshman player coming in. But, ideally, you always have one or two in your back pocket for that transfer, that graduate transfer. Now, they all count the same way. That’s where a lot of people make mistakes. Grad transfers and transfers count as a hard cap, they count as an initial scholarship and they count as an overall scholarship — just like an incoming freshman does. So, you do have to prepare for that.
"And then, everybody thinks, ‘Okay, well player X left the team. We have another scholarship.’ That’s not necessarily true, to give to a freshman. Yes, there could be an overall scholarship available — one of the 85. But, those can only be issued to walk-ons that have earned them — the Jordan Glasgow’s of the world, the Andrew Vastardis’ of the world. That’s how those guys get scholarships, because after one year of being on the team as a non-recruited walk-on, you can earn a scholarship if there’s one available, and it only counts against the 85, the hard cap."
That balancing act Dudek deals with is a way of life for a recruiting director.
"That’s the way you live," Dudek said. "It’s spreadsheets and lists, and that’s with players names, that’s with rules, that’s with periods coming up, that’s with flights you’re setting up for coaches, that’s with official visits coming this weekend. All those different things, and you just work through it.
"I’m certainly not a one-person department. I have an incredible staff. This stems from Coach Harbaugh — this place is a village. When we have something recruiting, it is all hands-on deck. You may be the offensive line analyst or whatever, and your job will be hosting a recruit and his family. Hosting meaning you’re going to move them from the weight room to the coaches’ office."
A big recruiting storyline from the 2019 cycle was Rivals.com five-star safety Dax Hill flipping his commitment from Alabama on signing day, and sending in a letter of intent to the Wolverines. Dudek gave some insight into how a program deals with the last minute switches in a recruit's decision.
"The reasons guys change their minds or are looking for different opportunities, are everything from they’re overreacting to another coach from another team, or they see that, ‘I thought I was going to step in, and that team is better than I thought.’
"There are the rumors out there of certain things given to parents, and things like that. But, I’d say that you always have a list. Towards the end of your class, we turn into a best available player situation. We’ve addressed our minimum needs or whatever term you use for that. And then, it’s, ‘We’re not going to turn away a great player.
"In Dax’s case, there were other players. Was there another safety? Yeah, we had a couple other safeties on the back burner, but we wouldn’t have turned away [freshman offensive lineman] Trevor Keegan to get another safety, necessarily, because Trevor Keegan may have a much higher upside. I say him because he was later with his commitment. He may have a much higher upside at his position than the backup guy you had at the safety position. But, it happens. You know it happens. I don’t anticipate it happening. If you talk to every coach and every guy in America, they’ll all say they don’t anticipate it happening. But, guess what? We’re also working some guys that have some committed status some other places, too. It works both ways."
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