A year of virtual recruiting has taught Bob Lopez many applicable lessons
In February, following the traditional signing day for the Class of 2021, Karl Dorrell and his coaches will have conducted the entire recruiting cycle virtually.
With the NCAA D1 Council initiating an ongoing recruiting dead period at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic that now will extend through at least April 15 of next year, a recruiting world that features no official visits or coaches traveling to check out prospects in-person is a reality that will be with us for the foreseeable future.
This year has without a doubt been challenging for recruits and programs alike. For many 2021 players, their senior seasons on the gridiron were condensed, postponed or cancelled.
Many more have committed and signed letters of intent to institutions they have never visited in-person.
Of course, on the other side of that coin are countless coaches that have struggled to evaluate a given player's skill set and personality when they've been unable to watch them play in-person nor host them on official visits.
Perhaps no one on staff at Colorado has had to work as constantly to mitigate this ongoing unfortunate reality than Director of Player Personnel Bob Lopez.
Often times, a prospect's first line of communication with CU starts in the email inbox of Lopez, who scours through countless highlight reels and inquiries from prospective Colorado targets on a daily basis.
Lopez and Dorrell go way back, with the two meeting while on staff at Northern Arizona in the early 1990s. Dorrell later hired him as UCLA's director of football operations during Dorrell's tenure as the Bruins' head coach from 2003-2007 and in between Dorrell's stint in Westwood and hiring at Colorado, the two stayed close.
While Lopez has decades of coaching, recruiting and administrative work under his belt, recruiting virtually in 2020 proved to be a hand that he — along with the vast majority of coaches across the country — had never been dealt before.
Thus, Lopez and his corps of assistants within CU's recruiting department have had a sort of forced learning opportunity on their hands.
A continual point of emphasis for Lopez and Co. has been how to translate the beauty and landscape of Boulder and Colorado's campus to a prospective recruit in a virtual manner.
"One of the strengths of CU is getting kids on campus," Lopez said. "It’s a great place to go to school, it’s a beautiful place to live and when you can't bring them to campus, you lose some of that."
The story of three-star inside linebacker Zephaniah Maea, who committed to Colorado on June 1 and signed with the Buffs last Wednesday, is a good example of how Lopez and Colorado's recruiting department have had to roll with the punches this year.
Maea picked up a scholarship offer from CU on May 28 and as mentioned, committed to the Buffs days later.
But on the morning of June 1, Maea did a virtual visit with the Buffs and then pledged to the team later that evening.
That's a pretty quick turnaround, from offer to virtual visit to commitment.
The pressure was thus on Lopez, his assistants, Colorado's strength and conditioning trainers and coaches during that virtual visit, which in many ways was make or break.
In other words, there was little margin for error in the case of Maea, nor is there for any recruit being introduced virtually to everything Colorado and the Buffaloes have to offer.
Maea had been considering Boise State and San Diego State along with the Buffs and in large part to the convincing virtual visit he went on, he chose Colorado.
"Recruiting is so much about feel and when you get mom and dad on the phone and you get a recruit on Zoom, you want it to be clean," Lopez said. "We had to work hard to bring Boulder to them to make sure that we were building relationships in other ways. Obviously, that was through FaceTiming and Zoom."
In Maea's case, and it's probably fair to say the same of the other 16 2021 prospects that signed on with Colorado last week, the virtual sales pitch worked.
At the end of the day, the year 2020, with how it has impacted recruiting, holds some lessons for the immediate future.
After all, the NCAA dead period is in place through April 15, 2021 (for now) and may very well be extended longer in the coming months. At any rate, at least a portion of the recruiting calendar for 2022 prospects will be dominated by virtual visits and Zoom calls.
Given that reality, Lopez knows that much of what he's been doing this year to impress recruits will be applicable in the near future and potentially longer.
"We learned a lot and we learned things that we can use in the future and use right now this (upcoming) spring," Lopez said. "We hope (the COVID restrictions) all go away quickly, but I think we’re going to be locked in here for a little bit more, doing the types of things that we’ve been doing."
In all likelihood, some of the virtual aspects of what we've seen recruiting-wise in 2020 will stay with us in the years to come.
Virtual visits seem like a particularly good way for a university and prospect to go through an introduction before deciding if an in-person official visit on the program's dime is viable.
Perhaps also in the future we'll see traditional no-contact periods be amended to allow virtual contact.
Either way and whatever the future may hold, Lopez is confident that he and his assistants are in good position to hit the ground running and go get some creme of the crop 2022 talent.
“It’s exciting," Lopez said. "We feel like we’re ahead of schedule a little bit, which feels really good. That coupled with the ‘21 class we signed — with recruiting, we’ve got to be great in that area. “We do feel good about our timeline, our plan for the next 15 months leading up to the December signing (period) in 2021 and I’ve got a great staff."
"They’re young guys, they’re aggressive, they’re bright and we’re always looking for an edge and ways to get ahead.”
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