The Curious Case of Arizona State in the 48th
ASU's Recruiting Systems and Arizona's unique factors cause the program to struggle to recruit the state.
The Arizona State Sun Devils under current head coach Herm Edwards have failed to successfully recruit Arizona. They have not gotten any of the 31 blue chips, 4 or 5 stars by 247sports composite rating, from the 48th state since 2018. They’ve only received 9 commitments from Arizona high schoolers in that time period despite ranking in the top 25 in 3 of the last 4 seasons. For a comparison point, Rutgers, which has won 11 games over this time period, has gotten 3 blue chips and 55 commitments from New Jersey, a state that produces similar amounts of FBS talent. So what gives? Why has ASU done so poorly?
In June 2021, the program had allegations of violating NCAA recruiting rules related to COVID 19 which has led to the departure of multiple assistant coaches. The departed coaches include former defensive and recruiting coordinator Antonio Pierce, former offensive coordinator Zak Hill, and former rising coaching star and tight ends coach Adam Breneman. Both negative recruiting from rival programs and having to replace productive recruiters are reasonable explanations for why the Sun Devils may have a more difficult time recruiting in state. Even so, this leaves us with three classes, 2019-21 ignoring the regime's transition class in 2018, where at least one highly rated Arizonan could have reasonably been expected to attend ASU. The issue gets even more dire when considering how Arizona’s education policies and human geography impact the physical distribution of high school football talent in the state.
Arizona is the 14th largest state with nearly 2/3rds of their population located within Phoenix’s metro area. Tempe, the location of ASU’s campus, is thus within driving distance of most of the state’s high school football talent. This is exacerbated by Arizona’s liberal school choice policies. Glenn Shough, father of Northern Arizona DB Brady Shough and Texas Tech QB Tyler Shough, is the Director of Football Operations at Hamilton high school. He explains the pragmatic effects of this policy, “It means you can go to any high school you want to… There’s certain rules against transferring, there’s gotta be some kinda cause or moving or things like that… [B]ut once you are in your freshman year you can go anywhere you want.”
Arizona law outlaws giving preferential admittance based on athletic ability, and Shough denies that Hamilton’s program recruits youth and middle school players. Himself and Chandler High running backs coach Eric Richardson, however, both acknowledge that youth feeder programs play a significant role in getting talent to local schools. This is present across multiple sports, such as track and field with the Arizona Cheetahs Track Club which Richardson coaches. The results of this phenomena show up in FBS offer data.
Between the 2018-2022 classes, 72 total high schools had at least one player get an FBS offer and five high schools had 10 or more players get at least one FBS offer: Chandler, Saguaro, Hamilton, Mountain Pointe, and Williams Field. These five schools accounted for 106 of the 298 Arizona players which received FBS offers, over 35% of the total. On the more fundamental level, Chandler has appeared in seven of the last eight state championships in the state’s biggest division (they’ve won six) and their opponent has come from the same list five times.
To summarize, Arizona State is a successful power 5 program inside of their state’s major metro area which holds nearly 2/3rds of the states population while their in-state rival has faltered. Additionally, the state’s education policies result in a significant portion of its talent to be centered in a small number of schools. Despite these natural advantages, ASU has not gotten many in-state recruits regardless of their rating. This is a puzzling and somewhat concerning result, but former ASU Director of Player Personnel Ryne Rezac offers insight into why this is the case.
Rezac began as a recruiting volunteer, and later intern, at ASU under Todd Graham from 2014-17 and returned to the program in 2018 as the Director of On Campus Recruiting after a brief stint at Nevada. He was later promoted to ASU’s DPP role in August of 2020 when Al Luginbill stepped down from the position, but was involved in the evaluation process throughout his entire second stint. While DPP his responsibilities included final say on if a prospect was shown to a position coach after multiple evaluations by student volunteers, arranging travel plans for coaches, and finalizing itineraries for official visits. He left the program in January 2022 to join Signing Day Sports, a company which looks to match high school players with colleges at all levels with video verified measurements.
While he was not asked if ASU’s NCAA investigation impacted his decision to leave the program, he was asked if his hands were clean with respect to the investigation, “Basically, no. Obviously, they're under investigation for a reason. So I can't say that my hands are totally clean. But there's a lot of things that were way above my head, that I had no knowledge about. You would think as a director of player personnel, at that level, you had a lot of say in certain things and, I wish I did. But I really didn't know.” He denied that he was involved in bringing players into the facility in violation of NCAA COVID rules and clarified, “The reason I say my hands weren’t clean is because I was just a part of the program. I don't want to say that I'm some squeaky clean person when, obviously, I'm a director of player personnel, and I'm part of that football team.”
As to why ASU struggled in its in-state endeavors, Rezac points in part to the program’s internal evaluation of the state’s talent. Citing recent population growth and its good coaching, he believes the talent is getting better with 5-10 top recruits a year similar to top recruits in bigger states such as California. He described the state as top heavy, but overall, “I think it's a little down compared to most states. Just in general, from top level football down to the bottom level. I think it's a little lower in skill set.” On the specific note of ASU not getting commitments from 247sports blue chips he noted that, “We don’t agree with the rankings probably 99% of the time.”
His claim on the state having 5-10 top recruits has some evidence. Between the 2015-19 classes, an average of 4.6 recruits from the top 15 Arizona recruits in a given cycle started for multiple years at a Power 5 program. It is difficult to assess if the overall skill set of Arizona’s recruits are meaningfully worse than other states, but longtime Chandler RB coach Eric Richardson disagrees, “[W]hen I first got here years ago, Arizona had some good athletes but not an overabundance of them. So if you’re ASU or [University of Arizona] or [Northern Arizona] for that matter, and you don’t get the one or two top kids in the state, it’s no big deal because it was only those one or two. Well now, if you don’t win the state of Arizona, you’re not gonna do very well because it’s a tremendous amount of talented football players.”
Regardless of the veracity of Rezac’s claim on Arizona talent, this belief informs ASU recruiting policy in the state. It limits the amount of kids they are willing to recruit, and thus makes them less likely to get any one player from that group. Using Rezac’s low estimate, there would be around 15 Arizona recruits between the 2019-21 classes that ASU would be interested in. Over this period they received eight commitments from AZ recruits, but only four of those had other Power 5 offers. The only non-ASU P5 offer for one of the recruits was Vanderbilt. So while there are a small number of high end kids that ASU is interested in, they are struggling to get those kids on campus.
Rezac, a native Arizonan, chalks this up to Arizona’s transplant culture. The theory goes that with the state’s recent wave of immigration, a specific start date of the immigration is not stated, kids grow up without an attachment to any of Arizona’s schools. Therefore, recruits see the Arizona colleges as any other school and are uniquely willing to go out of state to play football. He does not chalk this up to a lack of effort given by ASU on the recruiting trail.
Current BYU players and Chandler High alums Gunner Romney and Jacob Conover were cited as in-state recruits the program went after. They also brought on former Chandler head coach Shaun Aguano, who is reported to be well respected across the state, as their RB coach to get stronger connections to local schools. He also discussed Georgia Bulldog Kelee Ringo, Arizona’s top recruit in 2020, saying, “He was in our building every single day of his senior year for like three months straight. His mom would just come and drop him off, and he would just hang out with us. And we'd play video games with him. It was just a place for him to come relax and kick his feet up, and watch some film. We recruited that kid extremely hard.” The three players named did not respond to requests for comments.
The high school coaches and teachers which spoke for this piece disagree on the influence of transplant culture. Glenn Shough says that while there is a “faction” which believes in it, ASU has a large student body, around 55,000 at their Tempe campus, so even if families aren’t from the state they are “breeding Sun Devils fans.” As of 2019 ASU reported to have an alumni association, of which Shough, his wife, his brother, and his eldest daughter are a member, nearly 500,000 strong with almost half residing in Maricopa County, the county Phoenix is in. Eric Richardson, a fellow ASU alum, also disagrees, claiming that kids love Tempe and ASU’s football facilities outpace University of Arizona’s.
Richardson also disagrees with the implication that ASU’s struggles are unrelated to their efforts on the recruiting trail. He named multiple Chandler players throughout his time with the program which went onto the NFL that ASU did not recruit such as Cam Jordan, Dion Jordan, and Markus Wheaton. His examples were also modern, stating that ASU “barely breathed” at 2024 5 star Chandler QB and Ohio State commit Dylan Raiola. He also alleges, “they gave us all the reasons why they’re going to recruit [2023 4 star DL A’Mauri Washington]” despite him being recruited by schools such as Oregon, Arkansas, Georgia, LSU, Ohio State, and Michigan State. No player from Chandler high has committed to ASU from high school since N’Keal Harry and Chase Lucas in 2016. Richardson did not mention Gunner Romney or Jacob Conover.
Richardson understands that colleges have their own evaluations, however, “My problem is: is everyone else wrong? I mean, why is ASU so right because they’re not top 25 recruiting ever.” ASU did have the 24th highest rated class in 2020, but the main claim is that the program’s recruiting has not been particularly notable. Between the 2018-2020 classes, the classes who could have played multiple seasons, an average of 8.3 players became starters or regular members of rotations and 10.3 players left the program.These are not mutually exclusive and the latter may be inflated by increased transfers from the program being under NCAA investigations. It is outside the scope of this story to determine what is a good “hit” rate for recruiting classes, but roughly one third of an average 25 man class being “hits” seems reasonable. This is not evidence supporting that ASU’s scouting and recruiting apparatus is notably better than any other school’s, supporting Richardson’s claim.
While some of Richardson’s frustrations come from differing opinions on ASU’s individual evaluations of Chandler players, a significant proportion comes from the lack of contact between ASU’s staff and Chandler’s. He specifically mentioned Shaun Aguano, “We thought it would be different now that Shaun Aguano leaves and goes over there, [but] they got him indoctrinated too.” Hamilton High head coach Michael Zdebski described Aguano as being their program’s liaison with ASU and a “very good person”, although he did not indicate how often he had been in contact with them. Richardson also claimed that ASU WR coach and longtime local youth and high school coach Bobby Wade, whom he is personally close with, did talk with the program once but hasn’t since. He went onto claim that the staff at Chandler had heard from the staffs of Georgia, Alabama, and Oklahoma more often than ASU and heard from Lehigh (an FCS school in Pennsylvania) as much as the Sun Devils. It is worth noting that Richardson is also the head coach of Chandler’s preposterously successful girls track team and claims to have faced similar issues with ASU in that sport.
Not enough coaches at different schools responded to inquiry requests to determine if this was unique to Chandler. Zdebski, Richardson, and a local video journalist who goes by the pseudonym Just Chilly, however, all corroborate that there were no ASU coaches at the Chandler Unified School District Jamboree on 5/18. This was an event in which over 50 schools went from campus to campus to watch showcases of players at prominent schools such as Chandler, Hamilton, and Basha in a single day. Zdebski did claim that ASU coaches were at a MegaShowcase on 5/13 where there were players from 53 high schools in one location. While it is difficult to say the rationale behind ASU’s absence from CUSD’s jamboree, there are structural reasons to explain why the program may be light on speaking to coaches.
Under Rezac, chiefly the 2021-2022 classes, Arizona State’s offer count exploded. After giving around 230 offers for each of the 2018-2020 classes, which ranked them in the bottom 10 of Power 5 in terms of offers given, they gave out 341 in 2021 and 457 for 2022. Both of these are within the top 10 amongst Power 5 programs with the latter being the most in the 2022 cycle. While the amount and timing of offers were at the discretion of the position coach, per Rezac, there was an emphasis to be a recruit’s first offer for in-state recruits. The logic was that these offers, contingent on continued academic and athletic success, would stick with the recruit through signing day and lead to a commitment.
Rezac explained that they gave Arizona kids deadlines depending on the recruit’s personal timeline to determine if they were interested in staying in state so the program could “cut their losses” and move on if they weren’t. He did not state that this was a result of giving so many offers, however the potential connection is difficult to ignore. It is the author’s opinion that these two systems negatively interact. Coaches give out offers early to in-state kids with deadlines to determine their interest, but are then spread thin attempting to recruit many kids. Even if they are trying their best with the in-state prospect, they have to be spending less time with any one recruit given the volume of players they’re after. This allows other out of state programs to enter the picture more prominently as a player’s recruitment picks up and the deadline nears. The deadline comes and goes and the in-state prospect elects to be more interested in the out of state programs which are giving the recruit more time because they’re recruiting less kids overall.
It’s important to note that this theory is independent of the influence of transplant culture. This theory is difficult to verify, and only attempts to explain the more recent years of the Edwards regime. A concurrent force throughout the Edwards regime is their desire to recruit California. Rezac was careful to point out they emphasized recruiting in Arizona as much if not more than California, but California was a major goal for the program’s recruiting. Not only were Herm Edwards and former recruiting coordinator Antonio Pierce from the state and personally thought highly of the talent, internal studies also showed that ASU was at its best with California talent. Rezac explains, “A lot of California kids were recruited and played for Arizona State when we were at our peak level. And so I think, just philosophy wise, that was something that we really believed that if we wanted to be top of the PAC 12… [W]e needed a lot of California guy just because the talent over there was special.”
This is without mentioning how Edwards constructed his coaching staff. Across his five seasons as head coach there have only been three coaches on staff with specific Arizona ties: Shaun Aguano, former Paradise Valley and Arizona Christian University head coach Donnie Yantis, and Bobby Wade. Yantis left the program in January 2020 to become head coach of Valor Christian High School in Colorado, and is currently the head coach of Prestonwood Christian Academy in Texas as of February 2022. This is contrasted with six coaches with specific California ties: Herm Edwards, Antonio Pierce, Prentice Gill, Chris Hawkins, Chris Claiborne, and Juston Wood. Only Antonio Pierce and Prentice Gill have left the program.
As a program they still could have prioritized Arizona equally with California for recruiting. However, there is an expressed philosophical focus on California from the beginning, along with a coaching staff skewed towards experience in California over Arizona. This leads to a possibility on the level of the individual coach skewing their time towards California recruits where they have more connections and common ground with kids. Issues such as these get exasperated once offer numbers balloon and coaches are responsible for recruiting more kids.
While it is important and worthwhile to investigate the recruiting systems Arizona State created and how their incentives may have negatively impacted their ability to recruit in-state players. But we shouldn’t overlook the simple explanations, such as high school coaches simply not having a high opinion of Arizona State which poisons the well with their players. There are tones of frustrations similar to Richardson’s in The Athletic’s recruiting confidential on Arizona from some of the coaches interviewed. Michael Zdebski declined to comment on how he thought the current regime was doing at ASU, but lauded the University of Arizona as “Outstanding” with “constant communication and open to getting as many players on campus as possible.” Not enough coaches from enough schools were spoken to in the course of this piece to come to a conclusion on the general opinion of ASU, but it is safe to say we cannot dismiss the possibility.
tl;dr
Prior to their NCAA investigation, Arizona State appeared to be in a strong position to take advantage of a uniquely centralized state with a faltering rival and nearly all its talent within a short drive of campus. Even with their evaluations leading them to believe only a handful of Arizona recruits met their standards, a belief which has some empirical evidence, they struggled to get commitments. After talking to several local coaches and ASU’s former Director of Player Personnel, there are 4 possible factors which have caused ASU to struggle recruiting in-state:
Arizona’s recent immigration has caused a “transplant culture” where high school football players may be inclined to go to out of state programs. Several high school coaches and ASU’s former DPP appear to disagree on the size of this influence.
Late in Herm Edwards’s regime, the Sun Devils offered a high amount of recruits and wanted to be the first offer for in-state recruits. These could have negatively interacted such that coaches talked to any one recruit less and caused in-state kids to prefer programs which talked to them more often more recently.
Throughout the Edwards regime there has been a stated equal emphasis on recruiting Arizona and California. The coaching staff is stacked in favor of California experience which could bias individual coaches to lean more heavily on their Cali roots instead of AZ recruits.
It is possible that Arizona High School coaches simply don’t have a very high opinion of Arizona State’s regime, thus poisoning the well with their players.
These factors are not independent, and likely could interact with each other. For example, the belief in Arizona’s transplant culture along with being stretched thin could cause coaches with California experience to lean more into their roots. In turn this could then feed into the beliefs of Arizona High School coaches, furthering the poisoning of the well. It is also likely that none of these are the case and there are other, unexamined issues underlying the phenomena. Regardless of the why, it is difficult to see this trend reversing under the current Arizona State regime.