The FedEx manager emerged from the back room, arms out wide, delicately carrying a large bundle.

Laying upwards of 100 posters on the front counter, he voiced his fascination and praise for the detailed graphic to the customer in front of him.

But Radmen Niven was perplexed. When he made the order, the Arizona State creative designer told the printing center to make the Sun Devils camp posters “kind of big,” anticipating something a little larger than 11x17.

Instead, the faces of all 10 ASU football coaches were blown up on the fronts of over 100 movie-poster-sized sheets.

“They accidentally made it really big,” Niven joked as he stretched out his arms against the white wall next to him, trying to replicate the size. “We go in there and put it on the table and (the ASU coaches) were like, ‘We love that.’ Then we had to do it.”

🚂Behind The Scenes With The Train🚂



What Do We Do With Our Extra Posters?



📜📜📜 pic.twitter.com/Gd9RrMdOvr — ASU FB Recruiting (@RisingSunDevils) February 6, 2019

The mega posters are emblematic of Arizona State’s philosophies for rebranding and reinvigorating itself and its recruiting approach, falling right in line with Herm Edwards and the Sun Devil coaching staff’s persistence to throw a 50-foot antenna on top of every skyscraper-type idea it has. When Edwards and Co. inherited the reigns to the Sun Devils’ program at the tail end of 2017, the first few rides along the recruiting trail offered blunt honesty from some of the big-name California and Arizona high school coaches. During former head coach Todd Graham’s tenure in Tempe, ASU wasn’t very visible, or particularly admired, by some of the power brokers in the top two recruiting markets.

There was a distinct narrative, and ASU’s new regime had to rewrite it.

Now a year in, that same staff — with a few new faces, of course — parades into high schools with a caravan that can stretch five to eight cars deep. Often times, they bring in Edwards, offensive coordinator Rob Likens, defensive coordinator Danny Gonzales, and five other coaches. They fly a drone and document the entire experience like they’re making a low-budget indie film.

Then Niven, who stays behind in the car, takes out the mammoth two-sided poster from his tube and hands it to an ASU coach who later plasters it on the wall. It sits there as hundreds of unassuming kids pass it every day, towering over the flyers taped up by college football’s elite and serving as a reminder.

Arizona State was here.

“It says something. There’s Oregon and Alabama and, boom, Arizona State,” Niven said. “Compliance was like, ‘Yeah, you guys are setting a trend, no one’s done it this big before.’ They got a lot of calls about it from other schools, ‘Oh, you can do this?’”

***

Al Luginbill sat at the head of Arizona State’s war room in early June, updating local reporters on the state of the Sun Devils’ recruiting efforts. Niven, who had been on the job for less than two weeks, was stationed to his right.



ASU Director of Player Personnel Al Luginbill knows he has to rely on the younger generation, like Niven, to push that message across to ASU’s recruits. (Jordan Hamm/Sports360AZ photo)

The ASU Director of Player Personnel was candid with his comments just six months out from the early signing period: ASU was behind the proverbial eight-ball when it came to the Class of 2019. The same sentiment was echoed to Niven, who was told ASU was going to get ahead of 2020 while simultaneously catching up with the ‘19’s — a bold undertaking.

Niven started to piece the numbers together, quickly adding up well over 100 recruits the Sun Devils were pursuing. That’s over 100 kids that should be opening up graphics in their inbox every week.

But therein lied the problem.

“When we got here, we were like, alright, we need to send this kid stuff,” Niven said. “Well is there a picture of him? Here’s one off an iPhone. Well everyone in our conference has professional-style photo shoots. I can’t make something that doesn’t exist, I can try, you can do a jersey (edit).

“Here’s a picture of the kid -- but it’s off grandma’s cell phone from a high school game and I can’t make anything cool from that.”

It’s no trade secret, the more visits a kid takes to a perspective school -- both official and unofficial -- the better that school’s chances are in recruiting.

But the hidden benefits of those visits fall into Niven’s hands. He prepares a backdrop in a small room adjacent to the ASU student-athlete facility, just a stone’s throw away from the Sun Devil Stadium grass, and sets the foundation for months of content.

Shortly after he came on, ASU started to narrow its lists down of official and unofficial visitors and Niven started to gain guidance on how to best pull off a mass photoshoot. He talked to Peter Vander Stoep -- an Arizona State photographer who works for the Arizona Cardinals during their media day -- grasping a basic understanding while surveying examples.

“I was able to look at that stuff and say, ‘OK, if we can do stuff like this, that should give us an edge,” Niven said. “And it has, tremendously.”

When he took the job last May, the Sun Devils had 10 percent of their 2019 recruits photographed. Now, they have pictures of 70 percent of their 2020 crop.

As he delivers those eye-opening statistics, a sense of relief falls over his voice. After the entirety of Sun Devil football went through organized chaos catching up with the ‘19 class, they’re prepared for the 2020 signing day, energized with an identity and creativity.

Niven enjoys using the latter. He scours Twitter every day, noticing how other schools go about their graphics. While an onlooker views a recruit’s post and notices he was offered by a big-time program, Niven’s fixating his attention onto the setting, the backdrops, the poses, the props, every interchangeable piece of the picture in preparation to do something different.

“We have a diverse community at ASU, we want to be innovative,” Niven said. “When they visit a couple of times, they have different things they can look at. Some of these kids, they come out with like 500 photos. That buys me weeks ahead of time.”

The photo shoots are often the embodiment of Niven’s visions. He formulates a graphic in his head, filling in the blurs of his imagination with the Sun Devil recruits. At one shoot, he had kids put their index finger over their mouth for a “silence the noise” graphic. At another, he had them put their arms out and above their head so he could produce an edit of them walking out of Sun Devil Stadium.

Keen on separating Arizona State from everyone else, his ideas, however big or small, run aplenty. They tap into a new age of teenagers, those that could care less about a Kodak moment as long as it looks cool on Instagram.

“We’re like, we’ve got kids from Louisiana, all our blueprint states: California, Arizona. So let’s do something, let’s have the state flags,” Niven said. “Easy purchase, it’s a prop. Put the state flag on the kid, that’s something different.

“Next visit, let’s throw some chains on them. Let’s take them in the locker room. We have Sparky’s pitchfork -- the kids love that.”

***

In what was described as an “expedited” hiring process by university standards, Niven received his job offer in May, a mere three months after applying. In February, though, ASU’s wide receivers coach Charlie Fisher told the Sun Devils’ on-campus recruiting coordinator Ryne Rezac to reach out to Niven for the position.

Nearly a year prior, Fisher -- then the head coach at Western Illinois -- hired Niven for a graduate assistant position at the small FCS program, leaving for Tempe just as the new grad assistant was settling in to Macomb, Ill.

Still keeping up with the WIU program via social media, Fisher started to notice Niven’s art plastered across the Leathernecks’ feeds, alerting Rezac when the ASU graphics position opened.

Then, Niven admitted, he was still perfecting his craft. Most would refer to it as “just getting started.”

Recovering from a torn labrum after his four-year college football career as an offensive lineman, Niven was finishing his internship as a recruiting assistant at Northern Colorado in 2017, scarfing down the basics from YouTube tutorials and a few tips from designers.

“I was on the computer and kind of picked it all up,” Niven said. “Pretty much all self-taught.”

He would do anything to stay in football.

“I loved the recruiting process and then I started doing the graphics,” Niven said. “Wanted to be a GA (graduate assistant) in (a graphics role), which was really new, so it was hard. Worked in the oil fields, on The Football Scoop (a website that posts jobs in football) every morning looking for something.

“Got an opportunity at Texas Wesleyan (University), was a start-up NAIA in Fort Worth -- went there as a recruiting coordinator/director of football operations. Did all the graphics there and they were like, ‘Woah, this NAIA is putting up some great stuff.’ And I didn’t even think my stuff was that great but it was an edge in our conference.”

The top brass in Tempe has already seen that cement itself amongst the Pac-12’s best graphic departments.

Luginbill and Edwards don’t kid themselves. On a small-scale, they’re not going to connect with 18-year olds in terms of social media, music, video games or really pop culture as a whole. They begin to rely on the younger generation, like Niven, to push that message across to ASU’s recruits.

“This guy here (Luginbill points to himself) looks at it and sometimes doesn’t understand any part of it but I know it makes the world tick,” Luginbill said in June. “I get it and I also understand when I say that, I’m totally, me as an individual, dependent on our young guys in that particular area because they know it like the players know it and that’s the way this generation of players communicates, whether we like it or not.”

The ASU football department affords Niven freedom in his work, entrusting him with full clearance to throw out any idea, knowing his ability to connect with today’s recruit and today’s teenager.

More than just updating his Twitter feed every 30 seconds, the Minneapolis native starts studying release dates for popular movies and video games set to come out around the fall, when the majority of offers come out.

“What can we do to kind of have our stuff align with what’s going to be a pop-culture phenomenon with music, with everything, Niven said. “But you want to be innovative, too, you want to be original. That’s the hard part, trying to be original and think of something else no one else can think of.”

Take this summer for example. As Fortnite -- a battle royale video game -- began to consume the lives of nearly everyone under 25, and some older, Niven rolled out a social-media series integrating the Sun Devils with Fortnite.

It’s a marketing strategy as much as it is a content victory, co-branding Fortnite with Sun Devil football to drum up social media intrigue and keep ASU in the lexicon and minds of kids at all times — even when they’re hopping on Xbox at midnight in the summer.

But then there’s the standard Niven holds himself to, both in terms of being different and being innovative.

“Rad’s the mad scientist behind that,” said Antonio Pierce, ASU’s linebackers coach and recruiting coordinator. “He comes to me with 1,000 ideas. Sometimes I can keep up with him. Other times I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about but I just go with him. We want to make our presence (known). We want to be innovative, just like our president talks about. And we’re setting that standard.”

In an unsurprising move to capitalize on a nationwide trend, other schools hopped on the bandwagon of tying video games into their recruiting art. Some were creative, utilizing beautiful graphical work and imagery to showcase their commits in the video game, as well as tacking on game film.

Niven wanted to turn ASU’s graphic into a video. During a team paintballing session, he strapped numerous players with GoPro cameras and flew a drone above the action.



“Utilizing that for recruiting, everyone was like, ‘Wow, they did an actual Fortnite video,” Niven said. “Then I was looking and I was like, ‘Oh, you have to have a storyline.’ So if you actually look at the text, he was taking out all the special teamers -- the long snapper, the kicker.

“You want to have a detailed look to where, I like to look at something and say, ‘Did I miss something?’ You don’t want to just send a graphic to send a graphic, because the kid is getting so much stuff from all these schools anyway.”

***

Niven spoke about it in amazement. No script. No locked-down plan. No director. No matter. Niven had to repeat the accomplishment twice: the Sun Devil coaches knocked out each signing day commitment video in one take.

With Edwards and Pierce at the helm of the coordination and execution, they pulled off a near-30 second video for all 19 early-signing-day commits.

It started with Pierce carrying the letter of intent into the Devils’ war room, slapping it on the table in front of Edwards and having the recruit’s position coach speak about him for a quick 10-to-15 seconds before every coach clamped their fist in a pitchfork and simultaneously yelled: “Forks Up!”

The initial idea was confirmed a whole day in advance, coming together by a whim that December morning. From there, Niven quickly overlaid the videos into part of the initial commitment graphic, following along the “Call of the Sun Devils” theme -- which uses another video game, Call of Duty, to tap into recruit’s terminology -- that accompanied the 2019 class.

Cali Devil in the house.



Welcome to ASU, @JayD__5! pic.twitter.com/KYiCjQEtaW — Sun Devil Football (@ASUFootball) December 19, 2018

“You see a lot of the videos, I’ve seen them in the past, where the coach is sitting there, he’s real dry. He has a laser pointer and it’s a boring film session,” Niven said. “Well, no one wants to see that on signing day. They want to see the energy and they’re excited for them to be there. You can see the whole recruiting process and the coaches talking about them.”

For ASU’s coaches, that part’s easy. But it took them awhile to understand their role in Niven’s job.

There’s a funnel that starts with the prospect, trickles down to the recruiter and then to Niven. Coaches are the middle man between information and graphics, a vital part of creating unique and personal art for each kid.

With each coach-recruit interaction, ASU’s leaders fill up profiles full of notes. Just below his speed off the line and 40-yard-dash time are the Niven-specific notes. Maybe he’s a really big Drake fan, or his favorite super hero is Batman, or he is all about Fortnite. Add it all.

Niven will garner his own notes, too, peppering in a few questions during a recruiting visit or scrolling through their Twitter feed to check what they’re liking. All the while, he’s picking up a head start on personal graphics.

“It’s been difficult to get our coaches to understand how crucial those comments that they put in on kids when they’re talking to them because we constantly use that behind the scenes,” Luginbill said. “We’re going to try and give (Radmen) as many resources as he needs to be proactive rather than reactive.”

“He does a great job of finding that little edge that may give us a leg-up or a kid says, ‘That’s right down my alley.’ This generation, everything is instant gratification. And if you don’t have something to hold their attention, I don’t think you have a chance.”

Luginbill admitted ASU was “flying by the seat of its pants for, at least, the first 11 months” following Edwards’ hire. He and the recruiting brass stressed the importance of the recruiting comments but, at that point, there were other things to worry about, other things to maneuver into place.

To their credit, he said, the Sun Devil coaches figured it out on their own, forcing the minute, but crucial, details into their profiles. It’s become a habit -- one that’s allowed the coaches a peek into Niven’s world. Sometimes they even come back for more.

“Some of our coaches have great ideas. Some of them are so outlandish that you can’t accomplish them at times,” Niven said. “But our coaches are proactive. Always thinking of something. (Al and I) will be working out or getting lunch, or I’ll walk in and (a coach will say), ‘Hey, I got something.’”

Some ideas don’t always make it off the drawing board … for good reason.

“We had one coach ask if we could -- because a lot of schools are doing stuff with drones -- ‘fly (the drone) with the plane outside,” said Niven, who couldn’t hold back laughter. “It’s just like, ‘Well you can’t have (the drone) within a couple of miles (of the plane). If it gets sucked in the engine we’re going to have some issues. That was an interesting one.”

*** Other, non-plane-related suggestions, take shape much more effectively. Early in the season, Pierce came to Niven with the idea to produce a documentary series of his and then-ASU running backs coach John Simon’s recruiting adventures.

Pierce had done a similar social-media series as the head coach of high-school powerhouse Long Beach Poly, but this was going to give fans and recruits alike an inside look at the recruiting trail. So when Pierce and Simon hit the road, Niven hopped in the back seat and started filming, sometimes sticking his head out the sunroof to fly the drone.

“He’s hanging out the car, driving. We almost lost him two or three times,” Pierce said. “Couple times we were in some rough neighborhoods and I’m like, ‘Rad, you’ve gotta roll the window up.’ It’s entertaining. It gives people who are following our football program and recruits an opportunity to see what goes into it. It isn’t just two-minute highlight films. It’s the travel, it’s talking about recruits, it’s the relationship part of it.”

With ESPN experience in his back pocket, Pierce commanded the camera, able to take a director comment from Niven like, “Talk about this area,” and go on for 30 seconds giving an in-depth breakdown of the day and where they’re going.

Ignite Episode 1: The Hunt Begins#IGNITE pic.twitter.com/bBWKW331E7 — ASU FB Recruiting (@RisingSunDevils) November 27, 2018

The series also led ASU to one of its biggest breakthroughs.

Around the start of the season, the NCAA passed a rule allowing schools to produce recruiting videos, given there's no recruits, or mention of a recruit’s name, in the video. So when the Devils offered a recruit, Niven would film a quick six-second video with Edwards signing an ‘offer sheet,’ with the coaches who were recruiting the kid standing on either side of Edwards.

Fans, media, heck, other schools may have no clue who Edwards is handing the offer to. But, Niven said, that one recruit heard the ‘personalized message’ loud and clear.

Nearly three weeks after the season kicked off, they said, “Why can’t we do this on the road?” So, ASU’s recruiting leaders met with the school’s compliance department who green-lit the idea naturally after determining it stayed within the rules, adding, “Well, you’d be the first school to do it.”

Music to Niven’s ears.

“(The coaches) pull up (to a high school), they walk in, they have the GoPro, they have the drone shot of everything in the area and the high school name,” Niven said. “That’s an edge. Showing them talking to the coaches, obviously there’s some editing to leave out the prospect’s name.

“We knew we were going to do this in September but we strategically put it out so no (other schools) could suddenly just jump on board. There was a lot of prepping for it.”

Up until that point, it wasn’t public knowledge that schools could film at high schools or put out videos of its coaches talking to high school coaches. Of course, the recruit’s name was never brought up but he, and most, could quickly put the pieces together.

And like and inventor hiding a new product before getting a patent, ASU kept their idea up wraps for months, waiting to plaster it on social media until signing day drew near. There, it would have the most impact. Oh, and other schools would have time to replicate it.

“Our coaches were on the road and other (school’s coaches) were like, ‘They can’t do that. Wait, you can do this?” Niven said. “We’re all walking in there and other Pac-12 schools are seeing a drone and giant posters -- they were already mad about the posters and now we’re putting videos out.

“I was at the (American Football Coaches Association) convention this year and I was talking to some media guys in the recruiting (area) and they were like, ‘Yeah, we got our phones blown up. ‘Why can’t we do this and that.’”

Other schools wanted to copy. ASU had made it.

“I just saw a clip last night, I didn’t even realize, another program took three of our ideas on signing day and used in it February (‘s signing day),” Pierce said in late February. “I was like, ‘Alright, we’re trending up.’ We’re doing the right things.”

Even then, the Sun Devils wanted to keep innovating. Niven began to give coaches a GoPro and tripod on in-home visits. They’d place it in the recruit’s living room, press record and just let it sit there as they tried to sell a kid on Arizona State.

In a strategy that will expand, Niven admitted, they only filmed a few prospects the coaches seemed confident would commit. And once they did, Niven could cut up the footage and make a quick social video that grabs thousands of impressions and gives prospective recruits an idea of what an ASU in-home visit looks like.

🚂 Behind The Scenes With The Train 🚂



🥊 @Phon0nesix 🥊 #19NITE pic.twitter.com/0luSMQwYNS — ASU FB Recruiting (@RisingSunDevils) February 7, 2019