Wednesday marked an important signing day period for first-year head coaches like Marshall's Charles Huff.
The Marshall program went through the early national signing day with Doc Holliday working on an expiring contract and rumors swirling about his future, and on January 11th the school announced that they were going to let his deal expire in an attempt to move the program in a new direction.
About a week later Huff was announced as Doc's replacement, and he quickly went to work filling out his staff and hitting the recruiting trail hard as February's signing day way just around the corner.
At that February signing day presser earlier this week, Huff was asked about his recruiting approach looking ahead to the 2022 class. Marshall currently has a lot of offers out there to prospects of next year's class already, and Huff was asked if it matters to them how many stars a kid has, or who else has offered him.
Huff responded with a question directed back at the reporter - "Did you go to the prom, in high school? Did you ask the girl you really wanted to go with, or did you take the second choice?"
The reporter answered that he did go to the prom, but his top choice was already taken.
"Well you should have asked the one that you wanted to go with," Huff said, leading into the point he wanted to prove on recruiting.
"That's how we operate. We ask the ones that we want to coach. I don't care how good they look. I don't care what their star rating is."
"We want to go to the prom with the best looking girl in the school, so those are the kids that we recruit. We don't look at it as we're a second rate program, if they fit our recruiting dynamic, and they fit our recruiting profile, we are going to recruit them."
"Now, we're realistic. We have scaleability. We are going to recruit kids that we feel fit our profile.
Then Huff, who is fresh off a stint at Alabama where he helped them pull in the best FBS recruiting class ever while in Tuscaloosa, provided some perspective on how their next few weeks of recruiting are structured.
"At this point in the recruiting process, nobody knows where they're going. There may be some kids that have already committed, but nobody really knows. So right now, we are in the relationship developing stage, we will transition next week into the evaluation stage. Once we get into the evaluation stage, we get into the selection stage. There we will select the ones that we want to go to prom with. That's how we do it."
"Then, if they decide that they don't want to go to the prom with us, then we'll find another one that we want to go to prom with. That's how it works."
See more on the exchange with Huff in the clip.