Director of Player Personnel…

Organize recruiting

If LSU had only hired a "game changer" coach like Billy did for the gators.
Napier hires "game changer" coach
Think of how much better the season could have gone.

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What do they do?

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Director of player personnel is actually a hugely important role--especially in the era of NIL and the transfer portal. He's the guy who is basically in charge of tailoring our recruiting strategy, prioritization, and logistics to our staff's personnel preferences.


E.g. if our total NIL "budget" is X, how much of that are we going to dedicate to different positions? How do we account for a player we REALLY like who maybe doesn't play a priority position? How many available guys are there at the positions we really need? What positions are easier to fill via the portal, and which positions do you need to hit in your HS recruiting? How much resources do we dedicate to roster needs versus raw talent? To what extent do we expect to be able to fill roster holes thru the portal? What level of players can we expect to bring in via the portal? Real difference-makers, or just quality depth? Are we confident enough that the portal will have the guys we need to allow us to spend big NIL money on a position where we're already set? And to that end, CONSTANT scanning and (organization and delegation of) scouting of the portal. There are hundreds/thousands of players in the portal; you cant do a thorough scout on all of them--so you need an organized strategy there. Making sure our "NIL guys" are making the offers we want them to make (this has been a legitimate problem for some programs - NIL guys going rogue and making offers to guys THEY want that the coaching staff might not be as high on; prioritizing the wrong things). Tailoring our intermediate-longterm roster-building strategies to the macro-level trends in football. Implementing those strategies in terms of allocation of recruiting resources. To where are we going to dedicate our limited number of HC visits? How much attention should be paid to future years versus the present year? What types of traits are we looking for when we evaluate? Have we identified any inefficiencies we can exploit in the eval process? Are we looking for NEW inefficiencies? Do we guys dedicating time to that? How much time? Etc. Etc. Etc. - there's a MILLION responsibilities this position has, and that's BEFORE you even start getting into the actual boots-on-ground recruiting.


This guy is also building relationships with prospects and doing all the regular day-to-day recruiting stuff on top of the big picture things. Some programs (e.g. Miami) choose to prioritize that aspect of it, and give the position to a "program figurehead" type (Ed Reed). Other programs choose to prioritize the bigger-picture strategic roster-building and evaluation aspects (e.g. Vandy, whose DoPP is Barton Simmons, formerly one of the main 247 evaluators (who also played at yale and is generally super sharp with respect to trends in the game and trends in evaluation and recruiting)).



This is a position of legitimate importance. Think of how many details go into recruiting that you don't want your HC to have to worry about on a day-to-day basis during the season/during off-season practice periods. All those details are the responsibility of a position like DoPP.