Assessing talent taxing

By Tom Keegan     Feb 5, 2009

The process of evaluating high school football players off of tape sometimes stretches a coach’s patience. After all, modern technology hasn’t reached every talented football player’s town.

“Some high school programs in certain parts of the country, they have the sideline shot up in the box and they even have an end zone shot,” Kansas University football coach Mark Mangino said at Wednesday’s signing-day news conference. “Some don’t have either. They have a parent running up and down the sideline with a hand-held camera and it’s really hard because you can’t get a good angle on things. There are a lot of nights we get disgusted and say, ‘We’ll watch it tomorrow. I can’t take this anymore. I’ve got a migraine.'”

Sometimes, comic relief breaks the monotony.

“I’m not going to mention the school, but one time there was a school in a neighboring state, the camera was low and the poor guy, whoever was holding it, was trying to keep it on the game,” Mangino said. “He had a fellow reading a newspaper on his porch in the end zone. We watched the guy smoke four or five cigarettes, read the paper from cover to cover, went in the house, came out with a cup of coffee, put his feet up and watched the rest of the game. We had more fun watching that old fella sitting on his porch in the end zone we forgot who the heck we were watching. I think we did take a guy off that tape and I don’t think he was ever any good either. We spent too much time watching that guy on his porch.”

The guy on his porch wasn’t worth watching on tape, but he just might have been a valuable resource for the other half of evaluating high school prospects. He just might offer insight as to what’s inside the player, where he ranks in the all-important head-and-heart tools.

“I’m not as good as Dr. Phil at trying to get those things out of people, but there are things that I ask,” Mangino said. “I try to get players to talk or get their parents to talk and I listen. … You find out what a guy’s hobbies are, how much time does he spend at home, how many nights when coaches call him is he actually doing homework. You talk to his coaches, position coaches, find out what he does in the weight room, what his practice habits are. I like to talk to opposing coaches, see what they think of kids because these high school coaches, they’re all buddies in their regions and neighborhoods, and they talk about their players and an opposing coach will tell you more about a kid sometimes than a kid’s coach will because it’s his player and he’s trying to protect him. Are we right 100 percent of the time? No, we’re not, but I think we’re pretty good at it. We’ve gotten the right kids when it comes to values. They have the values that you’d like to see in a young man, in your children. The value of hard work, unselfishness, a value in education, understand that they’re getting a six-figure education for nothing and how important that is. … But every once in a while we miss. We’re not perfect.”

Nobody’s perfect, but Mangino and his assistants are better than most. Otherwise, Kansas wouldn’t have assembled enough talent to win 20 games the past two seasons, a feat that opens the kind of doors that led to the seemingly strong crop of recruits announced Wednesday.

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