Jan. 18, 2008

Sign Up Now For Signing Day Live

By Adam Lucas

At some point over the next three weeks, a high school football player will sit at a table in front of a series of hats representing his college choices. He'll pluck one from the table, plop it onto his head, and another college choice will be made.

That player might think he's being creative, but Butch Davis knows better. After all, he was part of the very first "hat" recruitment when he recruited linebacker Jessie Armstead for Miami in the late 1980s. That's just one of the many stories Davis has amassed in his long coaching career; in the really old (and really wild) days, he says, it wasn't unusual to find other coaches sitting in a recruit's driveway before the sun came up on signing day.

Davis won't be in any driveways on Feb. 6, this year's Signing Day. Instead, he'll be sitting in his office in the Kenan Football Center--where he will again be a part of Signing Day Live, a live show produced from inside the Football Center with exclusive recruit video and coach interviews--waiting for faxes to arrive.

Decades in the recruiting game have taught Davis an important lesson: it's not always how many players you sign, but whether they're the right ones, that determines the success of a class.

"When kids go places that are wrong for them for the wrong reasons, they almost always underachieve athletically and academically," he says. "That's why I don't think it's a good idea to pressure or force them. Some schools walk in and say, `We have one scholarship and if you don't take it today, it's gone.' I don't like that practice. Sure, sometimes you get in a situation where it's late in the process and you have limited scholarships remaining, but we try to make players aware of that reality when it happens."

That belief will shape the way Davis hits the recruiting trail over the next three weeks (for an exclusive look into the anatomy of how Carolina conducts an in-home visit, read this month's Tar Heel Monthly).

His goal won't simply be identifying the nation's best talent. It will be identifying the nation's best talent...that makes the best fit in Chapel Hill.

"We want it to be a win-win," Davis says. "We want you, but we want you to want us. When a kid comes and he's excited to be there, good things happen. A lot of kids we recruited at Miami were not superstar players. They might not have visited five great BCS programs. But we fell in love with them because of their character and what kind of kid they were.

"When they got on campus, they were able to thrive because they liked the environment and liked the coaches. Those kids tend to overachieve and do better than what's projected for them. Some of them even turned out to be first-round draft choices. And by the same token, I've seen players pick a school for what may have been the wrong reasons, and many times they will underachieve."

Davis knows many of those right reasons are in his favor in Chapel Hill. When he makes an in-home visit to a prospect, some of the conversation will focus on football. It's the head coach's time to talk about how the player fits into Carolina's plans and how being a Tar Heel will make him a better player.

But experience on the recruiting trail has also convinced Davis of another recruiting truth: most families aren't simply making a college football choice. They're also making a life choice.

"Athletes and parents understand that at some point football is absolutely going to be over," he says. "It might be over in high school, it might be over in college, or it might even be over in the NFL. And when it's over, a degree from North Carolina is significant because of the contacts you make and the relationships you can build in Chapel Hill. That will be important in your life after football, and there will be a lot more life after football. That's exciting for kids and that's especially exciting for parents."

Parents usually have a series of questions prepared, and the questions sometimes illustrate to Davis that he's not selling the same product other schools are selling.

"There are times we have to explain that a scholarship is room, books, board, tuition, and fees," he says. "That's it. But we do not negatively recruit against other schools. We sell the University of North Carolina and that is a philosophy we talk about as a staff. There are areas where we feel we have an advantage over other schools but we know the player will find those out when he makes his visits. There are so many great things about Carolina that our time is very valuable, and we want to spend it talking about us and why we think Carolina would be a great choice.

"Recruiting is the lifeblood of the program. And a lot of times recruiting success isn't the number of superstar recruits you get. It's about getting players in your program who are going to be good contributors, be dependable, and graduate."

Adam Lucas most recently collaborated on a behind-the-scenes look at Carolina Basketball with Wes Miller. The Road To Blue Heaven is available now. Lucas's other books on Carolina basketball include The Best Game Ever, which chronicles the 1957 national championship season, Going Home Again, which focuses on Roy Williams's return to Carolina, and Led By Their Dreams, a collaboration with Steve Kirschner and Matt Bowers on the 2005 championship team.