Kelly Lyell

kellylyell@coloradoan.com

Mike Bobo was in the middle of a meeting with his coaching staff when Leah Knight knocked on the door.

There was a call, she said, that the CSU football coach had to take.

It was a recruit, one of Rams’ prime targets for its 2017 signing class.

Bobo, totally immersed in fall camp — the two-week period of classes start when there are no restrictions on practice and meeting time — excused himself and took the call.

No matter how busy Bobo and his staff are, recruiting can never take a backseat to their other responsibilities, the coach said. Schemes, plays, game plans and coaching can only take a team so far. There’s still no substitute for talent.

“It’s something that you’ve got to do,” Bobo said. “If you want to build this program to where I believe it can go, we’ve got to recruit year around.”

So while Bobo and his staff are trying to get a young and inexperienced team ready for the 2016 season, his recruiting coordinator, Geoff Martzen, eight student interns and Knight, the assistant director of football operations, are busy as ever keeping track of players that could become future Rams.

There were 507 players on the Rams’ recruiting board for the 2017 signing class earlier this week, Martzen said, and 175 on the 2018 board. That doesn’t mean CSU has offered all of them scholarships, but that’s how many players Martzen and his staff are keeping their eye on. There are a lot more names on the board, Bobo said, than he dealt with during his 14 seasons as an assistant at Georgia and a lot more than Martzen tracked in 2014, when he was a recruiting coordinator at BYU.

CSU recruits nationally and already has commitments for its 2017 signing class from players in nine states — Colorado, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and South Carolina.

"The bigger the net, the more quality you're going to have," Martzen said.

Martzen and his interns review video of each prospects’ high school games and put clips together for coaches to see. They track down high school and junior college transcripts and search the internet and social media sites for mentions and news of each of those players. They compile a list of what other schools are recruiting the player and which ones have extended a scholarship offer.

Martzen uses that information to update the magnetic whiteboards that serve as the walls to his office on the second floor of the McGraw Athletic Center. Players’ names are listed on color-coded magnets that are rearranged daily to reflect the coaching staff’s latest evaluations. Players above the red line are ones the Rams feel they have the best shot at signing, while those below the line are probably “too big for us,” Martzen said, but too talented to remove.

Christian Colon, for example, was below the red line for defensive linemen on the Rams’ 2016 recruiting board. He was being recruited by dozens of top programs, including 22 in Power 5 conferences and committed to Penn State the summer before his senior year of high school in Charlotte, North Carolina. Penn State later pulled the offer, and Colon, a 6-foot-3, 317-pound noseguard, signed with the Rams and will likely play for CSU this season as a true freshman.

“We are going to keep tracking them,” Martzen said. “We’re going to keep recruiting them. … We’ll stay on a lot those guys just kind of hoping for something like that to happen.”

Most players names are placed on “the board” primarily through referrals, Martzen said. They were mentioned to a CSU coach by a high school or junior-college coach, seen by a member of the coaching staff during a visit to the school or at a satellite camp. Sometimes, they were even referred to the staff by another college program that didn’t have a scholarship available for that player that year.

“It’s still all about relationships in the sense of initially identifying a kid,” Martzen said.

Other names are added to the board because they’re being recruited by one of the two dozen or so schools the Rams believe they can be competitive with on the recruiting trail. One of the whiteboards in Martzen’s office lists those schools that include others in the Mountain West, along with the University of Colorado, Iowa State, Kansas, Washington State, SMU, Memphis, Tulane and Georgia Southern, and the players at each position who have been offered scholarships by those programs.

There are no secrets in recruiting anymore, Martzen said. Everybody watches the same highlight clips on Hudl that colleges pay $35,000 a year to access and sees the star ratings on Rivals, 247Sports, Scout and other recruiting websites. They all see the social media posts from players about which schools are offering scholarships, which ones they’re seriously considering and any commitments they might have made.

Martzen’s job is to keep the recruiting boards up to date, compiling as much information as he can on each of the prospects listed. It’s all stored in a database that everybody at CSU involved in the recruiting process can access at any time through their computers or a smartphone app, Knight said. The database, she said, also tracks the number of contacts between the school and each prospect, ensuring that NCAA limits are not exceeded.

Coaches make the call on where each player ranks on the board each day, Martzen said.

Bobo and his assistants spend 30 to 60 minutes a day talking or texting recruits, their families and their coaches during fall camp. The staff meets every Wednesday night to watch video and evaluate prospects.

Bobo said he’s constantly reminding his staff about the importance of staying on top of recruiting, no matter what else is going on. It’s each coach’s responsibility, he said, “to recruit your (geographic) area, and it’s also your responsibility to make sure we’re recruiting enough guys at your position. … You better make sure that if we need to sign five offensive linemen, that we’re recruiting 20 offensive linemen to get five.”

The basic system CSU uses is one Ed Marynowitz brought with him from the player personnel office of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins to Alabama in 2008, Martzen said. Alabama signed three recruiting classes ranked No. 1 in the country over the next four years, won four national championships in five years and had nine players from his four recruiting classes who were selected in the first round of the NFL draft.

Martzen and Knight both got their starts in that system in 2012 as recruiting coordinators at Alabama, where Knight was still a student at the time. Martzen went on to work in player-personnel roles at Boise State in 2013 and BYU in 2014 before coming to CSU in 2015. Knight spent two years as a recruiting operations coordinator at South Florida before joining Bobo’s staff.

Knight manages CSU’s communications with the prospects, arranging both official and unofficial campus visits, sending out the actual scholarship offers and accompanying graphics for them to share on social media. She knows which prospects are important enough to pull Bobo or one of his assistants out of a meeting to talk to when they call.

“Obviously, I wouldn’t just do that for everyone,” Knight said. “But we do have a board, and we do have our prospects ranked.”

Official recruiting visits, limited by NCAA rules to five per player and 56-62 per school per year, depending on how many they used the previous year, are arranged to give prospects as much time around the coaches as possible. So even though some visits, both official and unofficial, have taken place during fall camp and some will occur on game days this fall, most are arranged for December and January.

“The most important thing, and I say this all the time, the thing that makes our staff different from other staffs is it definitely is a family environment,” Knight said. “It’s important for our staff that our coaches and our coaches’ families spend as much time with a prospect as possible. … You hear Coach Bobo say it all the time, ‘It’s the people that are what makes Colorado State so special.”

So coaches make whatever time they can to visit with prospects and their families during the tours all recruits get of Fort Collins, the campus and the new $220 million stadium set to open next fall.

They call, text and write short notes to players they’re recruiting whenever they have a few minutes to spare.

Even during fall camp, when they’re scrambling to determine which players will fit in where this season and making sure each of those players know what to do in any given situation that might arise. Recruiting, Bobo said, can never be pushed aside to deal with later.

“It’s got to be nonstop,” Bobo said. “… To me, this is a time where if we can keep our momentum, make up ground in a camp cycle when all coaches get busy, and they’re focused on camp. ... But if we could cut out 30 minutes a day or an hour to take to hit your recruits up, then hopefully we can stay ahead of guys.”

Follow reporter Kelly Lyell at twitter.com/KellyLyell and facebook.com/KellyLyell.news