The Recruiting Game in College Athletics

The game of college athletics is changing nearly every day, but knowing how recruiting is — and isn’t — evolving remains essential to winning.

Blair Angulo has seen it all.

The West Coast recruiting analyst for 247Sports, Angulo has spent 15 years talking with high school recruits, parents, coaches, uncles, friends, teachers, colleagues, girlfriends, boyfriends, everyone. Anyone to get a scoop. The world of recruiting information is dog-eat-dog, and any in will help.

At the highest Division I levels of college athletics recruiting — Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and ACC football and men’s basketball — just about anything goes.

“We’re talking high stakes, negotiations, leverage plays — and just about anything under the sun from an enticing standpoint. When they’re trying to convince these players to play for their program, they will stop at nothing. I’ve heard of rooftop parties in downtown Los Angeles getting pretty out of hand with certain recruits. 

“A couple years ago,” Angulo continues, “Nike told a kid that they would make him a custom sneaker if he played at Oregon. If he makes it to the NFL, he’s going to get a custom sneaker. Now with NIL and with branding and with these players being marketable, these schools will not stop. I don’t think anything really is out of the realm of possibility.”

Few people know of Oregon’s rise more than Craig Pintens.

After a seven-year stint with the Ducks as senior associate athletic director, Pintens joined the Lions as LMU athletic director in 2018. During Pintens’ time in Eugene, Oregon became the preeminent football program on the West Coast and arguably kicked off a college athletic arms race that reverberated throughout the country. The Ducks won 17 national championships during Pintens’ tenure, but the more lasting impact was on facilities, staffing, and marketing, as Oregon just about set the national standard across its entire athletic department.

“At Oregon, we had amazing facilities, and a lot of them were built while I was there. So, I was very fortunate to witness that,” Pintens says. “But really, the arms race in college athletics has existed since the beginning of college athletics. And you’re going to have that when you have any marketplace where you’re competing for talent.”

In recent years, myriad rule changes across all of college athletics — from name, image and likeness opportunities that introduced a formal pay-for-play structure to relaxed transfer rules that have created nothing short of free agency to revenue sharing that could tip the power structure of college athletics altogether — have upended the system entirely. 

And not just at the highest levels of college athletics.

From well-paid football players who appear on football cards to nonscholarship athletes who would be happy with some cafeteria money, the recruiting game has forever changed. 

Recruits themselves have changed, too. They know what’s out there. They hear fanciful stories from some of their famous contemporaries. Just about every player in every sport wonders if there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

No two recruits are alike. What attracts one might repulse another, and sometimes a coach won’t find out until too late.

The questions an average coach gets have changed from scholastics and strategy — and, most of all, playing time — to inquisitions about nutrition and recovery and academic advising and marketing and jerseys, and, and, and.

“There’s been more change in the last three to five years in college athletics than any time period, maybe dating back to the formation of the NCAA,” Pintens says. “That amount of change also presents an opportunity. … So, you can be not happy with the change or you can choose to adapt to the change.”

The First Time

Like just about every coach out there, Rick Gotkin remembers his first time.

In 1986, Gotkin was barely 27 years old when he was hired as a hockey coach by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a tiny private school in Troy, New York. It is considered the oldest technological university in the English-speaking world. And it’s got one heck of a hockey team, with a pair of national championship banners in the rafters (1954, 1985).

A few years after that, Gotkin was hired as head coach at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania. Four decades after his introduction to collegiate recruiting, he still can recall his first recruiting trip.

“His name is Scott Burfoot — B-U-R-F-O-O-T — and he was from Winnipeg, Manitoba, playing hockey in Estevan, Saskatchewan,” Gotkin says. “Scott Burfoot was a kid that I started to recruit when I was working at Rensselaer and just academically, he wasn’t a great fit for that. But that’s how the relationship started, and I think Scotty was just looking for a chance to continue his education and play hockey at the same time. He ended up the best player in Mercyhurst program history, and he was just inducted into the East Coast Hockey League Hall of Fame.”

Read: “Your Move,” about the impact of the transfer portal on college athletics.

Gotkin, with five conference championships and six NCAA tournament appearances at three different levels, has seen four decades of evolution — slow and steady at first but almost meteoric over the last half-decade — and watched as recruiting became more and more cutthroat. 

He’s not altogether sad to get out of a game that’s very different from when he started. 

“Today, it’s a little bit of an arms race in terms of what a building looks like, what the locker room looks like, what a video board looks like, what a lounge looks like, and certainly now with the name, image, and likeness rules coming into the game, that’s a big piece of it,” Gotkin says. 

For today’s coaches, all of that has to be accounted for. 

But ultimately, it usually comes down to one thing. Finding out that one thing is never easy.

“That comes before you ever try to sell your program to a player,” says Stephen Merriwether, LMU assistant women’s soccer coach. “It involves getting to know them a little bit more and finding out more about them as a person and as a player. If you can do a good job of that, you can start to understand and build a real relationship with the player, and they’ll usually tell you what they’re interested in and then you can shine lights on those things.”

Unlike Gotkin, who is on his way out as a coach, Merriwether is near the beginning of his career, less than a decade in at the college level. His eight years in college athletics might as well have been eight decades at this rate of change. 

One thing that hasn’t changed is how important recruiting wins are.

“I think they’re just as important as wins on the field,” Merriwether said. “One leads to the other. If you’re winning the recruiting battle, then you’re able to win on the field, and they’re kind of similar feelings.”

And when it doesn’t go their way? When they pick up the phone with crossed fingers only to end it with slumped shoulders?

“There’s so many factors into how people make decisions,” Merriwether says. “We are happy and confident that LMU is such a great place. So, if it’s not the right fit for that person, it’s not the right fit for that person, and we’re totally okay with that. We just want them to be happy and comfortable with their choice.”

When that happens, all you can do is dust yourself off, regroup and get right back on the phone with the next recruit up.

“It continues to kind of evolve — actually on a daily basis, especially with the rules and the landscape changing on literally a week-by-week basis — so it’s hard to ever feel like you have it figured out,” Merriwether says. “We’re always learning and evolving and trying to stay with the times or ahead of the times as best we all can.”

The Vibes

Most often, Amherst men’s basketball sophomore starter Elias Chin said, a recruit picks their school not based on promises or enticements but vibes.

In 2026, for 90 percent of recruits out there, many of the tangible benefits are comparable. Every school is going to tout its academics and its alumni network and its food options. If you’re not one of a select few athletes in a major revenue sport in a major revenue conference, a student-athlete’s collegiate experience is going to be relatively similar. 

So, what helps a typical recruit make the call?

Chin — who starred at nearby Thousand Oaks High School and finished his career as the Lancers’ record holder in several categories — chalked it up to a feeling.

“Once you get into the groups of schools you’re looking for — for me it was Amherst, NYU, schools like that — it’s about finding the right coach, visiting the campus, seeing the area, watching their games a lot, figuring out how it would suit me. When I first started touring schools, Amherst was one of the first. I went to a camp, then did a visit right after junior season ended, and I loved it right when I got there. But it was my first one — I didn’t know if it was real or not. The vibes that people talk about, you just see a group of friends hanging out on campus and it’s like, ‘I think I could be part of that group.’ Subconsciously your mind realized this is the place you belong. … For me, it was always a clear-cut decision.”

Could it really be … that random?

Oftentimes, yes.

Sure, college athletics is big business. Division I and Division II scholarships amount to roughly $2.7 billion annually, according to the Education Data Initiative, across nearly 200,000 athletic-based scholarships. Other estimates peg the total to closer to $4 billion.

But perhaps the biggest changes in college athletics impact the untold nonscholarship athletes who are nonetheless benefitting from major advances in facilities, technology, transportation, and more. Gone are the days when even the best softball players were washing their own uniforms. Being a college athlete, scholarship or not, is not without its perks. 

Those perks, though, pale in comparison to finding a purpose.

Pintens points out that student-athletes are looking for much the same thing in a university that other students value.

“You want to see what it is like to be a student there. What are the places that you’re going to be a part of?  What are classrooms like? What are dorms like? What are your eating options on those particular campuses? The same concepts apply within that ecosystem for athletics, they’re just a little bit different,” Pintens said. 

But playing a sport also is an important part of exploring their purpose in life. 

“All those things still matter for a potential student-athlete,” Pintens continues. “But they’re also interested in where am I going to train? What type of medical care am I going to receive? What kind of strength and conditioning am I going to receive? How easy is it for me to get extra work in in my particular sport? … Ultimately, a student-athlete is concerned about what type of academic experience they’re going to have, but they’re also concerned about what type of athletic experience am I going to have? And the better facilities you have, the better support system and infrastructure that an athletic department builds, the better off you’re going to be in winning any type of recruiting battle.”

Jon Gold is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer whose work has been published by ESPN.com, Billboard, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and others.