I think we can benefit from being in the ACC. It's a great basketball league. If anything, it helps our recruiting.
I'm really considering all the schools. It's not fair for me to only look at certain... programs just because they had players that are at my stature.
I hated Duke, and I hated everything Duke stood for. Schools like Duke didn't recruit players like me.
If we have somebody who may be ranked a little higher than another person, if one of them wants to be a Buckeye, wants to play in that rivalry game, play in the Horseshoe, that matters to us. We take all those things into consideration and we try to be as aggressive as we can on the recruiting trail.
Probably the number one position that has the greatest number of players to choose from is receiver. When we're out there recruiting, there are a lot of receivers out there to recruit. It's harder to find defensive players.
When you look at guys who get recruited, most of the best athletes, they come from poor families. I don't forget. I was a junior looking through my mother's stuff and looked at her bank statement, and we had $30 in the bank.
Central Michigan was the one FBS team that recruited me hard.
In the NFL you get one first-round draft pick if you're lucky. You couldn't really outwork anybody else. In college I could recruit ten players with first-round talent every year.
It's been a big flaw of ours in the soccer department that a lot of our best athletes go and play other sports. But I think young players have seen me, and others, go over to Europe and play in some of the best leagues - and MLS is improving so much, too.
My senior year of high school, when I was getting recruited for college, my dad goes to me, 'You can become an Olympic champion.' And that's the first time that I'd heard someone else say that to me. I was like, 'Uh, are you talking to me?'
What you see at a bachelor or bachelorette party is what happens on a recruiting visit.
It was always like there was no doubt in anybody's mind that I was going to UCLA, so once UCLA started recruiting me, everybody started pushing me there.
At the end of the day, if you're not beating the teams on the road recruiting that you have to beat on the field, then you're probably not going to win many championships.
I'm a good special teams coach, and I can recruit.
In high school, my dream was to go to the NBA. But when recruiting came around, the letters for football compared to basketball were like 25 to one, and my one wasn't from Duke.
I was a runner and a soccer player living in Okinawa, Japan and I didn't have recruiters coming in to recruit me for sports. So how many kids out there and planning to go to college are super stud athletes but don't have a chance because they come from some podunk town and no one comes to watch them?
I made three visits during my senior year of high school to Duke, UNC, and Virginia. If I hadn't gone to Duke, I would have went to Carolina, just like a lot of Carolina players who, had they not gone there, would have went to Duke.
As a collegiate, I think you spend 50 percent of your time recruiting. It is a distasteful process.
There are guys who have no business being in school, but they're here because this is the path to the NFL. There's no other way. Then there's the other side that says raise the SAT eligibility requirements. OK, raise the SAT requirement at Alabama and see what kind of team they have. You lose athletes, and then the product on the field suffers.
My local newspaper, the 'Bend Bulletin,' interviewed me while I was at high school after I had just signed with the University of Oregon. I remember I wore a University of Oregon hooded sweatshirt, and they took a picture of me in the long jump pit. I was freezing!
I was very close to playing at an Ivy League School. The Division I schools, when a coach would come visit all he would talk about was my size.
If every university president said, 'The revenue producing sports: basketball, football - potentially revenue producing at most universities - maybe in a few cases women's basketball, if every one of them had a monitor that reported directly to the university president and no 'student-athlete' ever gets into this college or university who could not plausibly be admitted if we did not have a football or basketball team, end of problem. It won't happen because it's like unilaterally disarming. You know your opponent won't do it and then you'll get crushed in every game, but it's a simple thing.
I don't recruit against Nick Saban. I recruit for the University of Georgia.
Considering the relatively brief careers of professional athletes, teenagers who are good enough to play at the highest level should be able to exploit that market.
So, I got a lot of recruitment letters from track.
