Says at ND recruiting is more about fit than talent. Does he really believe ND can compete at an elite level while saying we aren't interested in recruiting elite players? would post the link but it's from scout and I am not sure if that is against board rules.
Swarbrick is saving Notre Dame football. Recruiting is his focus now. Notice how great we are doing in recruiting after a 4 and 8 season. Jack has got the right coaches now and is working on the talent inflow.
Swarbrick: More recruiting resources needed
Jack Swarbrick believes Notre Dame’s programs hit the mark in recruiting talent. Where he believes there’s room for improvement is finding fits.
Editor’s Note: Earlier this month Notre Dame Vice President and Director of Athletics Jack Swarbrick sat down with Irish Illustrated for a wide-ranging interview that explored his faith in Brian Kelly, future football schedules, upgrades to facilities and investing in student welfare. That interview also included a conversation about recruiting.
The story got Jack Swarbrick’s attention.
Earlier this summer, Cleveland.com published a deep dive into Ohio State’s recruiting operation that detailed the Buckeyes’ 10-person recruiting department that’s funded with combined salaries in excess of $600,000. The piece detailed how Ohio State identify talent and how it recruits it, from film evaluations to on-campus visits to social media engagement.
Considering Ohio State is on pace for a historic class this cycle – the Buckeyes have as many Top 100 prospects committed as the entire Big Ten and Notre Dame combined – it was the find of expose that can trigger soul searching elsewhere.
Yet for Swarbrick that wasn’t the reaction, at least not exactly. But Notre Dame’s athletics director does believe the University can upgrade how it approaches talent acquisition.
“Our resource focus is on fit evaluation more than talent evaluation,” Swarbrick told Irish Illustrated. “I very much think we have to give our coaches additional resources to evaluate fit. That’s by far our biggest challenge.
“This is a unique place. It provides extraordinary benefit to young people who take full advantage of it. Whether it’s reflected in our graduation rate or just the evaluation of students, for the right kid this is an unbelievable place.
“Our challenge is when we miss on fit because it’s much harder for our coaches to fill a hole in the roster. They’re not going to take a junior college transfer, they’re not going to over-sign a class. They’ll carry that for a couple years if we miss on fit.”
To that end, Notre Dame plans to hire Bill Rees to assist in evaluations after he filled a similar role at Wake Forest. The father of quarterbacks coach Tommy Rees has evaluation and scouting experience with the Kansas City Chiefs, Chicago Bears, San Francisco 49ers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Rees also was as an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator at UCLA from 1979-94.
If the Rees hire is an investment in manpower, Swarbrick also wants to enhance Notre Dame’s data library.
“We need to engage in a more robust analysis of whether there are factors that predict success at Notre Dame beyond the obvious ones,” Swarbrick said. “Are there things you can look at, objective information, that you can capture about people? That’s what Fortune 500 companies do when they’re trying to hire. It’s what the military invests so much money in.
“We’ve been engaged in regression analysis of our classes over the last 10 years to try to find if there is anything that’s predictive that helps suggest success.”
Beyond that, Notre Dame wants to do a better job getting under the hood of prospects before trying to sign them.
“Every coach here is focused on trying to attract people who can be future leaders of their teams, but assessing leadership is incredibly hard,” Swarbrick said. “Just because they were a captain of their high school team doesn’t mean they’ll be an effective leader here.
“Can we give them some simple measures of things to look for? The major league sports have invested majorly in this. The NFL can make everyone take the Wonderlic test. In a recruiting context you can’t do that. So how do you do it? Are there questions that give you insights into personality traits?”
These are the kinds of questions the Irish want to ask.
That’s not exactly following Ohio State’s lead in recruiting, but it’s a way to get Notre Dame on an improved recruiting path.
“Talent evaluation is very important and we certainly engage in that,” Swarbrick said. “But fit evaluation is, to me, the difference maker for us.”
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