How Should College Football Coaches Handle 'Negative Recruiting'?

Recruiting is a difficult and tough business.

And college football recruiting has become more cutthroat as the jackpot bulges with astronomical payouts to schools in BCS bowls. Coaching staffs know how their words can shape a prospect's decision on where he will attend school and unfortunately, negative recruiting can be a part of that process.

Instead of waxing poetic about their own school's attributes, some recruiters bring up the negatives of other schools listed on a prospect's schools of interest list. The pressure faced by recruiters to land that highly-coveted prospect isn't just limited to school pride—coaches can be rewarded with generous bonuses if they land a highly-ranked recruiting class. 

Negative recruiting often leaves a foul taste in fans' mouths but more often than not, fans are now engaging in this tactic. More on that in a minute. Make no mistake, negative recruiting is occurring. 

Davin Bellamy, a 4-star defensive end, signed with Georgia this year but his journey to get there wasn't a bed of roses. More from the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

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One of UGA’s top signees, Davin Bellamy, turned a lot of heads when he tweeted this last month:

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“One of my last in-home (visits), a school spent an hour and half telling me why I shouldn’t go to Georgia.”

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Most prospects are teenagers and because of their chronological age, they're prone to changing their minds quickly. They also can be fickle—nothing is really a guarantee on signing day until that prospect attends his first class in college.

Coaches may deny they negatively recruit, but the reality is it happens everywhere. Vanderbilt head coach James Franklin told the AJC that "it's all over the place."

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I have no problem with people doing research and showing it. But when it’s just negative recruiting without any facts to back it up, that’s the stuff that’s a little frustrating when you’re dealing with 17-year-old and 18-year-old kids that can be easily influenced.

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Negative recruiting can be tailored to seize upon a school's looming crisis—such as telling a prospect that another school's head coach won't last in his current position or that school will be heavily sanctioned by the NCAA—or done in very broad terms. 

On signing day five years ago, then-Arizona head coach Mike Stoops commented about his rival school's academia, according to CBS Sports:

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"Each school has to recruit to that school and what type of academic requirements there are," Stoops said. "Obviously, Arizona State has turned into a J.C. and we are a four-year college. According to all the players, they say it is easier to go to school there, easier to get in. I thought we had the same requirements. It is news to me."

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So, yeah. That's not negative recruiting tailored to one specific recruit—Stoops just threw a blanket of negative recruiting across the entire state of Arizona. His public apology withstanding, Stoops was probably miffed over Arizona commit Ryan Bass flipping to Arizona State. Stoops' comments still appeared petty and spiteful and they probably backfired on him because for the next few years Arizona State's recruiting classes were ranked higher than Arizona's by 247 Sports. 

Some recruiters will tell you they don't do any negative recruiting. UCLA assistant coach Adrian Klemm, FOXSports/Scout's 2012 Pac-12 Recruiter of the Year, told me he doesn't participate in negative recruiting. Klemm focuses on getting to know the prospect and his family. 

"It's all about relationships," he told me. "If you're genuine and just be yourself and you're not trying to run game on kids they recognize that — so do parents."

Sure Klemm sounds like a saint and he may be a rarity in college football, but it also helps to have a beautiful campus, academic excellence and a recruiter with Super Bowl rings on his hand to help persuade a teenager to sign with UCLA. 

Some schools don't have those advantages and resort to negative recruiting. We don't know if that tactic works, nor do we care—what we care about is how coaches counter it, if at all.

If a coach discovers one of his prospects has been negatively recruited by another school, the most effective response is to simply set the facts straight. Some coaches may ask the prospect why he would want to sign with a school whose coaches focus more on why he shouldn't sign with a school than why he should sign with one.  

While negative recruiting has always been part of the recruiting process, social media has perhaps exposed this phenomena in a brighter light. High-profile prospects who have Facebook or twitter accounts are constantly subjected to pleas and threats from so-called fans. 

One high school prospect, C.J. Johnson, was so disgusted over the comments left on his Facebook page that he declared early to Mississippi and shut down his Facebook page. To further exacerbate the problem, social media sites now have created a place for rival schools' fans to get dirty laundry on a prospect. More from Sports Illustrated's Andy Staples: 

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What the recruits don't seem to realize is that the explosion of social networking sites has spawned an entirely new creature: The Recruitnik Cyberstalker. Unlike urchins such as myself who get paid to look for that stuff, these guys receive no compensation other than the joy of knowing they've made life miserable for a rival school.

In other words, players committed to Ohio State should understand that some Michigan fan is trolling the Web looking for their dirty laundry—and vice versa. Players committed to Miami should know that Florida and Florida State fans with too much time on their hands will scour Facebook profiles and MySpace pages looking for incriminating evidence.

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Unsettling? Yes. But that also has produced an unintentional consequence: Prospects are now more apt to recognize negative recruiting and because of its proliferation they are probably not biting as much at its lure. And coaches should seize on that.

Coaches should be looking squarely in a prospect's eyes and simply asking him, "Why would you want to go to a school that disrespects another school?" And then allow the prospect to answer the question.

If he raises concerns, address them straightforwardly and honestly.

And then walk him over to your wall of players in the NFL, your room of trophies and the equipment room that shows all of your team's uniform options. 

Tell him how much you need him and why you need him. And what your school can offer him.

And if you can't consistently sell your school based on its own merits then you're probably not doing a very good job. Which means you probably won't last very long in today's volatile and instant gratification era of college football.

That's more negative recruiting fodder for your rival school.  

Perhaps the best way to counter negative recruiting is just to win. 

Talk is cheap. So is negative recruiting.

That crystal ball, however, speaks volumes.