Utah Football: Calm Before The Storm

Today is one of those quiet days before a big storm.

Tomorrow is National Letter of Intent Day, or as Utah fans call it, the day we complain about who we didn’t get.  And it looks like there will be a lot of complaining this year.

As I’ve pointed out, I don’t spend a ton of time on recruiting, mostly because some other guys do it so much better than I could hope to.  But tomorrow we’ll have links to the signings as they come in and some thoughts when it’s all complete.

I was thinking about something however.  At the level Utah is recruiting at now, it has to be difficult to define who we are,  Especially because we are recruiting against so many different factions.  In Utah we’re recruiting against BYU who pitches their BYUness and tries to guilt LDS kids into coming there while saying that they aren’t welcome at Utah.

Now as we try to get into Pac-12 level recruit homes, or in the south SEC level recruit homes, we have to go against schools saying that we are BYU, that Salt Lake is Laramie, WY and quite likely that African-American kids aren’t really welcome.  It has to be a much more difficult task than almost anywhere else.

Wazzu, Arizona and hell even BYU can tell you who they are, but telling someone who the University of Utah is, well that is complicated.

As a side note, it’s why I think Brian Johnson is such a wildly important and effective recruiter, a black guy from Houston, who can tell those kids from the south what a great experience he had.  Sharrieff Shah is also in that mold.

All this was simpler in the MWC, because against those schools, we had more resources and quite frankly the pitch, if you want to win, you come here if not you go to San Diego St., is pretty easy.  Everything about playing in the Pac-12 is more complicated.

Some food for thought as we head to Signing Day.