NC State head coach Dave Doeren met with the media via Zoom Wednesday afternoon to talk about the Wolfpack's recruits who officially penned their letters of intent during the National Signing Day.
NOTE: Click on the video in the player above to watch Doeren’s press conference. A transcript of his comments will be updated below.
Opening Statement
Signing Day is always a really, really cool day with these guys. You start recruiting some of them when they're really young, and it's just one of these special moments in a young person's life, a stepping stone, I guess you'd say, a milestone. It’s a complete honor, as a coach, to be in the journey with these young men and help them achieve their dreams and goals. We always talk about recruiting, and recruiting is a lot of things now, more than it's ever been, but to me, recruiting is about finding the right fit where you can grow into the best version of yourself, as a young man with the goal of a four-to-five-year window turning into the very best you can be when you face the real world when college ends, on the field, off the field, obviously as an athlete, as a student, and as a grown man. I take that as a huge responsibility, and I'm thankful to all the players and parents that have signed and joined us today. There’s more coming that I can't announce because we have a handful of guys that have announcements tonight, tomorrow, and the next day. It's just how their schools are doing them. As you know, until they do that, I can’t, so there will be a few more that aren't talked about today that will be talked about by the end of the week.
For the 26 that did sign that I'm allowed to speak about, we're super excited. It's a class that, when you go through it by state, [there are] seven in-state players, four from Georgia, four from Florida, which has always been our major footprint if you look at our roster, South Carolina, and then we've ventured up northeast a little bit, like we have in the past, with New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Alabama is actually becoming a better and better place for us in recruiting with the Mobile area and Birmingham. Getting into that area, I’m super excited we were able to get a kid out of the Midwest, in Illinois, with Stephen Brown. Then, [we had] one player from Virginia and one from Maryland.
Eleven of these young men were captains of their football teams which I love. It’s pretty cool to have so many, I think it's 15, multi-sport athletes in this class which is something I also love: guys that are competing, not just in football, but year-round. Quite a few positions are represented, and there'll be, as I said, a few more additions to it, but I’m really excited about the skill, and we needed to add more players in those positions and feel like several of these guys will be able to play early in our program.
It's unique. It comes on you fast. You play your last game on Saturday, and four days later is signing day. Some of these guys are still playing; we’ve got several of them that are still in the playoffs themselves and have state championships they're trying to gain in as a team. Then you turn around, and January 12, we'll have 22 to 26 of these guys moving in mid-year, and so it's amazing how quickly all this stuff goes.
I’ve known a lot of these guys for a long time, some of them, not as long. I mean, I've known Aiden Smalls since he was a freshman, and Jacob Smith, I've known a long time. Some of these guys, you get to know in their sophomore, junior, and some of them even in their senior years. We’re really excited.
I want to say thanks and give my recruiting staff a shoutout. There's three areas in there now [with] the way we have our recruiting staff. Andy Vaughn is our general manager and does a great job, and he's the one that handles the communication with families, agents, and everything that goes into this now, from a rev[enue]-share standpoint. On the recruiting side, Alex Faulk, we call ‘Suge,' and his staff do a tremendous job. LaFayette Stewart and he, when kids come on campus, do so much showing these guys around. Tyler Jones, one of our former players, [does the] same thing. Those three guys do an amazing job representing us and showing kids around on campus. Taylor McDonald and Shelby, our on-campus recruiting coordinators, I think Taylor is probably the best hire I've made in a long time. What she does in the recruiting office is just fantastic. Austin Shelton, Danny, and Daniel [Bernstein], what they do in player evaluation — they're on our player personnel side — and so you have a player personnel side, you have a recruiting side, and you have a general manager and on-campus recruiting side. It's a lot of moving parts in recruiting, and you don't get them for a lot. Some of these kids come up here once or twice, so you don't get a lot of time with them, and you've got to put your best foot forward and be as capable as possible of showing them what the experience will be like. I thought our recruiting staff did a tremendous job of that this year: finding our kinds of guys.
There's some surprises in here as well. I think one of them was just announced with Lawrence Brown, a player we really liked from Grayson [HS in Loganville, Ga.] that made a decision to flip to us from our rival school. It's always great to have one of those here at the end, and [he’s a] great outside linebacker and rusher. When you go through the class, you guys can ask me individual questions about the players, but changing schemes defensively, it was a huge emphasis in getting players that we felt like were really good fits in our scheme now with the ability to play three-down and four-down and playing with linebackers that are more capable of fitting in the scheme that we have. Obviously, you saw the success that Caden Fordham had in the scheme, so just finding that true inside linebacker and then the hybrid linebackers like we saw with Cian [Slone] and Tra [Thomas] this year. We had none of those in our program going into the year, so we had to really put an emphasis on recruiting that position.
On D.J. Eliot’s role recruiting the Mid-Atlantic region…
It had a lot to do with D.J. being in Philadelphia, coaching at Temple, living there, recruiting that area, and having some relationships up there. I also have [relationships] from my time recruiting up there; when George McDonald was here, we went up there pretty hard with Kelvin Harmon, Louis Acceus, Josh Fedd-Jackson, Devin Leary… It was a productive area for us for a while. When D.J. started getting interest from guys up there and getting them on campus, it was easy for me as well to get back in there. Jordan Moreta's coach and I have a really good relationship, so it was great to rekindle that with the recruiting of Jordan. That's what recruiting is. It's relationships, and I know there's transactional pieces now with rev-share, but most families want to know their kids are going to be taken care of, relationship-wise, and that means there's trust. When you have long-standing relationships with high school coaches in an area, it does make that area easier to recruit in, and D.J.'s obviously allowed us to do that in the Northeast.
On the common thread between recruits signed from that region…
They're tough kids. I don't know exactly why that's different because I've never lived there. I've recruited there a lot. In Wisconsin, we had a lot of Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio kids on our roster. They're tough kids, and the way they're brought up, maybe the communities they're in, their fan bases in the Giants and Eagles; you look at the fan bases up there, and they're pretty intense. These kids are used to competing and being around tough, hard-nosed people.
On the revenue sharing and transfer portal impacting recruiting…
Each year has been different, and this year has probably been the easiest of all of them because you actually know what your numbers are. In the past, you're hoping because every dollar you're talking about is a dollar you've got to raise as a coach. To actually have a number that you don't have to fundraise to get to makes it a little easier to plan out. What still makes it challenging that you mentioned is our attrition comes later, and so you're adding before you know how many you really need to add. For us, it’s trying to get the high school players in, one, that can play right away which we've done that over the years, some that we can develop — we're going to develop all of them — but that won't play right away because they need a little development. You take your high school class based on who you know is leaving the program, who are our seniors and things like that, and that's where the portal now has to supplement. You may have more attrition than you expected at a certain position, and you didn't sign as many high school players as you needed, and so that's where that comes into play.
It's interesting. I think I learn every year how to do it, and then it changes again, and that'll happen again here. I think every college coach would tell you: our calendar is just not in sync with the demands of what's happening in our sport, and so we need to get our arms around that to make our jobs a little bit easier from a planning standpoint. With that being said, you’ve got to do the best you can with what you have, and I feel like this is a really good recruiting class, man. We met all our needs, and there are some more guys that you'll see coming in that accentuate the class in a positive way, and there are some really good players, really good kids, and some guys that can help us next year.
On Josh Warren, Jr.…
Josh is a really good pass rusher, and something that [said] I've since last year: we've got to get past rushers in this defense. You saw the impact that Sabastian Harsh, Cian Slone and Tra Thomas had, and they weren't guys that we had on our roster a year ago. The last five or six years, we've been recruiting to the 3-3-5 defense, and so now that we're in a 3-4/4-2 scheme, we have to have more pass rushers, and that's what Josh is. You watch his film, and he's a dynamic pass rusher. He can bend. He’s got really good speed. He’s got long arms. He can play our Jack position or our field end position, so he's versatile. You see that with these guys that we signed that are edge players, as a lot of people call them, but Elijah Satchel is that kind of player. Lawrence Brown's that kind of player. They're that hybrid player that we need more of on our roster.
