Bloomgren, staff move the goal posts
Coach’s strategy for players mines junior colleges and recruits transfers
Mike Bloomgren heard a lot of things when he took over for David Bailiff as Rice coach in late 2017.
He heard you can’t lure graduate transfers to South Main. That you can’t find junior-college athletes who qualify for Rice. That you can’t attract enough student-athletes to build a large class, much less a deep roster.
But as he gets set to enter his second season as Owls football coach, Bloomgren and his staff have disproved many of those assumptions.
Halfway through the year they’ve given Rice its highest-rated recruiting class since 2001 (ranked 65th according to 247 Sports) while attracting twice as many junior-college players as the school had seen in the past decade.
“It’s such a big story. It’s such a big part of our team right now,” Bloomgren said of the junior-college and graduate transfer additions this offseason. “The process is going, I can feel it every day. I’ve never been more confident that this is a sustainable deal here. When we turn that corner and get to our first bowl game, we should go to one every year.”
The story of Rice’s budding emergence under Bloomgren could fill a
book. But arguably the two most important chapters would be about he and his staff’s ability to attract high school seniors and less traditional student-athletes (walk-ons, graduate transfers and junior-college transfers).
Through the former, he’s sold recruits on the typical Rice talking points: great academics, the intimacy of a smaller environment and more recently, the opportunity for early playing time.
Contributing to that pitch are an array of facility upgrades, a recently approved indoor pracice facility and a revamped branding effort to promote a lifestyle centered on the team’s social media hash tags :# Intellectual Brutality and #FlightSchool.
“You can look at the 2020 recruiting class right now — they’ve got (13) commitments already,” Rice assistant athletic director/ marketing David Pillen said. “I’m not going and recruiting but a lot of the things we’re putting together are a byproduct of those recruiting efforts.”
Pillen said many former Owls players have approached him about his team’s graphics and videos,
which usually feature aerial shots of the campus blended with players sprinting, sweating and colliding over the bass of a trap beat. Sure, it’s made the alumni a little jealous, but it’s also helped sell a colorful image of the school behind the hedges.
Off of social media, Bloomgren and his coaches have aimed to have more presence by working more camps across the country (Florida Atlantic, Georgia Tech, Nebraska, Northwestern, Stanford and Texas, to name a few) and luring the Adidas 3 Stripe Camp from College Station to South Main.
“We know we’re going to have to go coast to coast to find the talent and we’ve been blessed by the administration to be able to do that,” Bloomgren said, adding another goal is to expand Rice’s national brand. “It’s to widen our net and get eyes on people we never would’ve had an opportunity to.
“Also, if I’m a kid and I’ve never gotten an opportunity to be coached by us, you get to see our staff ’s expertise and how we can help prepare you for a future in this game.”
“Yes, we’re stretching more,” linebackers coach and recruiting coordinator Scott Vestal said of the Owls’ national recruiting approach.
Vestal, who worked for Bailiff in his final year at Rice, is hesitant to compare the respective approaches because the recruiting landscape changed so drastically after the 2017 inception of the early signing period, which he thinks intensified recruiting.
Still, in light of the expansive approach under Bloomgren, he said it’s also a balance to juggle national ambitions with local Texas ties.
But that same national approach that’s helped Bloomgren and his staff attract players from 14 states in two classes has also played a crucial role in how they’ve rebuilt and restructured the roster through other additions.
Bailiff once compared finding qualified junior-college players to fishing in the Dead Sea. In his 11 years, the Owls landed just two (center Nate Richards and defensive tackle Stuart Mouchantaf, both in 2012). At the time of his firing, every C-USA roster except Rice had at least four junior-college transfers.
In this most recent class, Bloomgren added 10 transfer players (three from junior college) in a class that swells to more than 30 once you include walk-ons.
“It was like finding unicorns,” Bloomgren said of his staff’s efforts to mine the ranks of junior colleges. “We needed a full commitment from our staff. Once we identified what positions we needed a junior-college kid at — for us it was DB and receiver — we have to find a kid who meets the academic profile Rice needs.
“It’s easier to find in California because many kids make the decision to go to junior college because they’re betting on themselves…where as in a lot of other parts of the country, you only go to JUCO if you don’t qualify. I’m kind of surprised because if you’d told me we’re going to take three junior-college kids in this class (receiver Bradley Rozner, cornerback Miles McCord, safety Naeem Smith), at least two out of three would’ve been from California but they’re from Cali, Iowa, and Texas.”
Bloomgren saw just one graduate transfer in his time at Stanford.
At Rice, he expects transfers to remain important although they’ll be less frequent now that his roster numbers more closely resemble his preference — 102 expected in camp this fall versus 89 last fall and 47 healthy scholarship players during spring 2018.
“Will it be one or two juniorcollege guys a year?” he said. “Probably. In terms of grad transfers, I don’t think it will be this volume again but what’s the norm? Maybe five transfers instead of 10.”
Bloomgren and his staff are excited about a 2020 class that briefly sat among the top 50 in the country. It ranks higher than schools such as Nebraska, UCLA and Virginia Tech.
He credits Rice for following through on its pledge to provide the resources to allow his staff to recruit expansively. He also credits lesser-known staffers such as recently named director of recruiting Alex Brown and the graphics and video teams who’ve helped enhance the way his staff communicates with recruits.
But ultimately, he points to the way he and his staff prioritize relationships.
“For some coaches, you lose touch with recruiting a bit the longer you’re in the system,” he said. “For me, it hasn’t been that long, it’s been 19 months. So I’m very comfortable.
“I joke all the time that I lay in bed next to my beautiful wife and text and DM 17-year-old boys.”