SALT LAKE CITY – The recruiting rankings are liars.
Or, perhaps, they simply need an additional element: The Utah Metric.
One program has 16 bowl appearances in college football’s last 18 full seasons, as well as multiple conference championship-game appearances, a pair of Power 5 league crowns and berths in, among others, the Rose, Sugar, Holiday and Alamo bowls.
Also, one program has yet to sign a consensus top-30 recruiting class since 2006 that has seen a collegiate field – and has had its recruiting classes ranked by the industry-standard 247Sports model in a range from No. 30 to No. 68.
Of course, the answer is that both programs are the same: Kyle Whittingham’s Utah Utes.
And the Utes are in the process this year of welcoming the program’s top-rated signing class under Whittingham, director of player personnel Robert Blechen and the rest of the Utah Football Consistency Machine: 2023’s No. 21 composite class, which checks in at No. 23 in 247Sports’ team rankings.
Utah, arguably better than any Power 5 program, identifies, recruits and develops players to the Whittingham standard. With Whittingham entering his 30th season on staff with the Utes this fall, the last 19 as head coach, and director of football sports performance Doug Elisaia present for every step of Whittingham’s head coaching journey, Utah leans into a consistency that has no equal right now in college football.
“Probably two-fold. One, the coaches and the strength staff and all of that,” Blechen tells FootballScoop during a recent visit. “And also, finding the right kids who have the ability to be developed. We’ve kind of taken more guys who aren’t ready-made products, but we’ve maybe taken a guy who’s a little bit taller and faster than the polished recruit that you couldn’t take. Because the 6-foot-3 polished guys usually are going to some blue-bloods. But trying to find guys who have certain measurables or something unique about them that can be developed.”
The NFL Draft reflects Utah as a blue-blood program in its own standing; 51 Utes have been drafted since Whittingham’s first full season, the program has had 17 first- and second-round picks in its last two decades and enters the coming autumn after consecutive years with first-round picks.
Aside from identifiable measurables, the Utah formula, in essence, has been borne of a rather straightforward approach:
There aren’t many motivational slogans plastered throughout the Utes’ Eccles Football Center, but Utah Football will be:
- “Tough, smart guys”
- “Fundamentally and technically sound”
- “Eliminate bad football”
Utah’s defense will be, unapologetically, R.S.N.B.:
- Relentless
- Smart
- Nasty
- Ballhawks
Unassuming and comfortable with the program perhaps flying somewhat beneath much of the national college football radar, Blechen admits the recruiting tides are turning as the program builds upon a Pac-12-best run of four consecutive championship game appearances in the last four full seasons.
“We’ve been able to win some good battles on some kids,” says Blechen, also key in the Utes’ consistency as he’s in his eighth season with the program, the last five as DPP. “We had a corner (consensus four-star CJ Blocker) last year we were able to hold off Alabama and USC. He had even been committed to us and decommitted at one point, where usually once a guy decommits, you never get them back. But we were able to do something right with him to get him to hop back in.”
Utah’s approach is to drill down as much as possible beyond the stats, raw data and film.
“There’s so many good players out there, it’s just about trying to identify the right ones,” Blechen says. “Because you only have so much time. You can’t call every kid, you can’t trip every kid. Just trying to find the kids that we think will pick us and are the types of kids that we want.
“So yeah we go head-to-head with the bluebloods a decent amount, and we’d like to think we’re a blueblood now, but just the way I think some kids see schools, Utah is not going to be the sexy school because we haven’t been. Maybe we’ll get there one day. They like Oregon’s uniforms or SC is in L.A.; people don’t know about Salt Lake as much.”
In arriving almost a decade ago from Simi Valley, California, Blechen too remembers being one of those unfamiliar with arguably the unparalleled beauty of the Salt Lake Valley, with outdoor activities aplenty for the region nestling between the Wasatch and Oquirrh mountains.
“One of our biggest deals is getting a kid onto campus and into the city. I didn’t realize Salt Lake City was such a nice place and even as big as it was,” says Blechen, whose department has grown to eight full-time employees as the Utes signify their investment. “I thought, ‘Utah, it’s going to be in the middle of nowhere.’ No, it’s a big city; NBA team. Trying to just identify which kids to sink the time into. You keep swinging, but you can’t swing at every one. Try to be strategic with which kids you want to invest the resources in.”
It’s a tested and proven approach at this point. While Utah does not experience the same level of roster turnover as some other programs where patience to sit and be developed sometimes wanes, the Utes do attract quality transfers.
Quarterback Cam Rising is a Texas transfer, coming off consecutive seasons of various All-Pac 12 honors and rehabbing at a feverish pace an torn ACL stemming from the Rose Bowl loss to Penn State. There’s quiet optimism around the Utes’ program, with players having 24-hour access to the program’s hydrotherapy recovery pools, that Rising can be ready by the season’s Aug. 31 against visiting Florida.
Utah also returns veteran offensive coordinator Andy Ludwig following Notre Dame’s very high-profile, public pursuit of the play-calling veteran.
“I don’t know how close it was; I saw the stuff in the media, but I think that that was huge,” Blechen says of Ludwig’s return. “Just especially with the quarterback coming back for his fourth season with Lud; maintaining the consistency with the offense and not having to learn a new system, and Lud’s been doing it as long as anybody. We’re lucky to have him and glad to keep him.”
Other recent NCAA Transfer Portal additions to the Utah roster include players from Auburn, Florida, Florida State, LSU, Oklahoma, Texas, USC and Washington, to name but a few.
“Nope. No,” Blechen says of much roster attrition, “and 90% of the departures that we have are by design. We’re not too upset about it. Probably another reason is that it’s the type of kids that are coming here, and I do think we have a pretty good culture here. The kids like it, so people don’t want to leave. Even when we’re like, ‘Hey, Johnny, you’re probably not going to play here.’ [Their reply] ‘Well, no, Coach. I’m going to stick around and prove you wrong.’ So it’s a good thing that the kids want to be here.
“As opposed to you know where if your locker room is fractured, maybe people aren’t putting in as much time to extra film study, extra lifting. They’re organizing 7-on-7 deals on their own. I think that’s probably another reason why I think we’ve had good success with player development.”
The staff’s ability to identify these character traits also helps Utah find players open to broadening their positional horizons at the college level.
In fact, Blechen admits it’s one of the job challenges he most relishes.
“Probably projecting position changes, I think we do that more than most schools,” he says. “Love (scouting) quarterbacks, absolutely love it. That’s my favorite type of prospect to recruit, just because they’re usually going to be smart. So if you have a quarterback who doesn’t throw it that well, can he be a safety? Can he be a corner? Like one of our starting corners right now had no offers coming out of high school and was a high school quarterback, but he couldn’t really throw. He just was an athlete. We tried him at safety and that didn’t really work out. Tried him at corner and now he’s probably a future Draft pick in the next year or two. But he’s 6-3, fast. It’s just finding kids like that and trying to get them into a spot where they can be successful.”
Ultimately, consistency in approach, demands and messaging carry the day for Utah football, as evidenced by the program’s 75 wins in its last eight full seasons.
“We kind of have this thing, I don’t want to say we have all the answers or have this thing figured out, but so many people from the weight room to the training room to the coaching staff to the personnel department have been here and gone through this before with Coach Whitt, it’s kind of like clockwork,” Blechen says.
“We’re tweaking stuff constantly and seeking ways to improve, but the overarching structure is there. It’s just like a machine, which I think is kind of why we’ve seen pretty consistent success. Outside of the COVID year, I think it’s four-straight Pac-12 championships (appearances). I know how Coach Whitt is going to react to certain things, the weight room; it sounds like I’ve been here a long time, eight years, but I’m probably right in the middle of people who have been on staff for 20 years or same strength coach for all of Coach Whitt’s time here. When you just know how things are going to go, it just eliminates a lot of the time spent like (asking) ‘How are we going to do this?’.
“Consistency is a big part of it. You hear of certain kids who go to certain colleges who have three different head coaches or position coaches in their time, and that’s tough to have to learn everything. Now we’ve got some stability with our offensive coordinator spot; Lud’s going to be going into his fifth year. So that’s been good to get some consistency there because we had seen that job change more than we wanted it to. Defensive side of the ball, those guys have been here forever. And now the offensive guys have caught up, we’re putting some points on the board, not having to win strictly by just running the ball and playing defense. Now we’ve got a good quarterback, two-straight good quarterbacks, in (Tyler) Huntley and now Rising, so it’s been good to see the offense kind of catch up. Now both sides are firing at a high level.”
Which means the consistently good Utes just might be on the verge of something else: consistently elite.
