Interesting stuff.
The narrative has been well told by now, how USC shook off its unthinkable Class of 2020 recruiting struggles, hired a new defensive staff featuring one of the top recruiters in the country in Donte Williams, rejuvenated its momentum and reversed its fortunes with the No. 8-ranked 2021 signing class.
But the origin of USC's recruiting reboot was actually obscured by the shadow of that preceding nadir.
Early in 2019, as a variety of factors were driving the Trojans toward their lowest-ranked recruiting finish on record (tied for 71st nationally, last in the Pac-12), the groundwork for the future was also being set.
After seeing his already undermanned recruiting staff lose its axis of operation with the departure of Eric Ziskin, USC coach Clay Helton would take his time filling the post, eventually hiring a 26-year-old from Fresno State named Spencer Harris, and in so doing setting a new strategic course for the department.
It's understandable if those on the outside didn't see at the time the future crystallizing in that hire in April of 2019, but behind the scenes a shift was underway, rooted in interweaving connections and influences that thread from Tuscaloosa, Ala., to Seattle to Athens, Ga., and back to Los Angeles.
Not to mention a series of dominos to come that couldn't have been known then.
More on that in a bit, but the first of those dominos was USC turning the reigns of what should be one of the more desirable recruiting jobs in the country over to an under-the-radar upstart who a handful of years earlier had gotten his entry into college football as an ambitious equipment manager at Washington.
Two years in, with the perspective of everything that has unfolded since, that hire is looking like an inspired -- and pivotal -- decision.
"It's OK to be young and talented," Helton says over the phone last week, reflecting back on the first move of what has become a significant reconstruction of his recruiting staff. "There's a lot of good men and women that are looking for their breakout opportunity that are really talented at what they do and they're just looking for that chance. And those that are willing to take a risk on that talent and what that person is made up of are going to reap the rewards. And I really felt that with Spencer.
"In interviewing a bunch of folks for the position and then having a chance to sit down with Spencer, I loved his work ethic, I loved his talent at the position, I loved his big-picture aspiration and his vision of that department. And it was outside-the-box thinking. I just felt, 'Wow, this guy, he's got it.'"
Not knowing the full scope of who USC considered for the role -- or more to the point, who considered USC -- it's hard to gauge exactly how appealing the job was nationally in that moment.
The Trojans had just gone 5-7 the previous fall, Helton's future looked cloudier than ever -- factors that would contribute greatly to the outcome of that already-in-the-works 2020 signing class -- and it was widely known that USC's recruiting staff was lagging well behind its national peers in terms of size and resources.
Harris was aware of all of that as well, but he's also intrinsically competitive and had found his calling in a job that can be a tireless grind no matter what the extenuating circumstances. Years earlier, he had quit a finance internship to rejoin the football program at Washington (after his initial equipment manager stint) while still in school there. An opportunity on the player personnel side had opened and Harris saw quickly the career he wanted to pursue. A former captain of his high school football team, his preference was always for a future in athletics, and he found a fresh outlet for competition in the world of recruiting and the idea of playing an essential role in building the rosters that would ultimately decide wins and losses on the field.
Having spent two years at Fresno State while moving onto more responsibility after his start with the Huskies, he now saw the next opportunity to continue his rapid ascent in the business and help chart the future for one of college football's marquee brands.
"I really felt I was ready for the next opportunity and the next challenge. And yes, I knew USC had challenges. They were just coming off the 5-7 2018 year, I knew that they were understaffed, I knew that the perception wasn't great. But still, it was USC," Harris says, looking back. "... I enjoyed my time with Coach Helton and felt like he was going to empower me to build this department and make a big positive impact on how we evaluate players, on what our process is, on how we operate our business."
Essentially, Harris wanted to bring what he describes as a pro-model personnel department to USC. He traces the genesis back to what Nick Saban installed at Alabama after returning from his time in the NFL with the Miami Dolphins. One of Harris' mentors at Washington, Marshall Malchow -- now the associate AD for football at Texas A&M -- had been wired just like Harris as a student at Alabama, eager to find a place and future in the sport while pouncing at an entry-level position with the Crimson Tide early in Saban's tenure. His weaving path eventually landed him at Washington, where he taught the tools and philosophy to Harris, and it's that vision and model that Harris would then pitch in his interview at USC.
It's a vision that has come into full focus over the last 14 months, not only in terms of recruiting results but through the commitment from athletic director Mike Bohn and associate AD Brandon Sosna upon their arrival in late 2019 to start turning Harris' ideal plans into tangible reality, essentially doubling the size of his department and making some recent power-play moves to bolster USC's growing arsenal of acclaimed recruiters.
With that augmented infrastructure now fully aligning with Harris' plans, those inside the program would like to think the signing day results this year were merely the start of the Trojans' climb back to a more familiar and consistent perch atop the recruiting rankings.
"His vision has come into play," Helton reiterates. "And when vision and resources come together -- his vision as well as the resources that Mike and Brandon have provided us -- that creates special things."
While playing a variety of sports growing up in Sacramento, football had always stood out most for him. And when it came time to pick a college there was one overriding criteria that had to be checked.
"A big sports school was a requirement. I was a high academic student so that was a requirement as well, but I wasn't going to Cal Poly or an Ivy League -- I was going to a school with a major sports following, so I ended up going to the University of Washington," he recalls. "I went the business school route, was in finance, but my whole life was like, if I can work in sports in my career that is the ideal path. I grew up loving Jerry Maguire -- I want[ed] to be an agent."
His first taste of the business was far from such glamor.
One of his fraternity brothers was working with the Huskies football program as an equipment manager and introduced Harris to his boss. Harris would start the spring semester of his freshman year and spend a couple seasons in that role, while forming an important connection for the future with Joseph Wood, who was an assistant on the Washington football equipment staff then and is now USC's assistant AD for football/chief of staff.
"Being an equipment manager, it's a great entry point into college athletics. If you look at our staff now, I was the equipment manager, [new USC director of recruiting strategy] Marshall Cherrington was an equipment manager, [new director of scouting and player relations] Jeff Martin was an equipment manager, Joseph Wood was an equipment manager," Harris says.
That said, it ultimately wasn't what he wanted to do -- not specifically.
"Really cool opportunity to be around the program, be involved in it, but at the end of the day I didn't love the actual work of being an equipment manager, so I said 'I don't think this is for me, I'm going to go into the finance world.' So I ended up quitting that job," Harris recalls. "My last season as equipment manager was Coach Sark's last year, he went to 'SC after that, coach Chris Petersen gets hired and six months later the same fraternity brother who got me into the equipment manager job, he started working upstairs in the football office and he told me about the position, what he's doing working in recruiting and it sounded extremely intriguing -- much more aligned with what I would like to be doing, using my brain and being much more involved in the football operation. So I quit my finance internship and started interning with UW football."
Petersen had first hired Malchow at Boise State in 2012, and he'd bring him along to Seattle as well in 2014. While none of that had anything to do with USC at all, it was the first of several pivotal confluences that would factor in for the Trojans down the road.
"This was the summer going into my senior year of college. And I met the director of player personnel from UW football who had just gotten there," Harris says, telling the story. "Marshall was a pioneer in this player personnel industry. He was a student at Alabama and interned at Alabama in kind of the early-ish Nick Saban days, winning national championships, and when Saban came from the Dolphins he brought the NFL personnel model to college. That's where all of this started was when Saban left the Dolphins and came to Alabama. ...
"Long story short, as soon as I met Marshall and someone else that he brought with him named Aaron Knotts, who's still the chief of staff at Washington, he kind of lifted the hood on player personnel, recruiting, player evaluation. I pretty much knew immediately that this was going to be my career path. This was now senior year in college. So I spent the rest of college and really about nine months after I graduated college learning everything I could from Marshall Malchow and Aaron Knotts, and spending as many hours as I could up there in the office, building relationships with the coaching staff, building relationships with Coach Pete and working as hard as I could with these two mentors, and it was just kind of a perfect fit for my personality. Not only the passion for football, but also the passion for decision-making, competitiveness. Recruiting is so competitive and you get to play such an essential role in building a roster, and the fact that I can have a role in winning football games by bringing the best football players in was kind of a dream opportunity for me."
At Washington, Harris went from holding the title of recruiting specialist in 2014 to head recruiting specialist in 2015 and ultimately assistant director of player personnel in 2016 before moving on to the director of player personnel role at Fresno State the next two years.
When the USC position came open with Ziskin stepping aside as the assistant AD for recruiting and player personnel -- he'd explain then that it was no longer a job he saw himself doing long-term -- the relationships Harris had built helped position him as a candidate for a major career move.
By that point, Malchow had rejoined Kirby Smart -- who had been the defensive coordinator at Alabama during his time there -- at Georgia. Harris' connection to Wood, who had then become USC's executive director of football operations and chief of staff, helped, but perhaps even more important was a connection that then-USC director of football operations Sam Curtis had with Malchow. All the dots started connecting for Harris and USC.
"Joseph Wood knew who I was, obviously we worked in equipment together, so a lot had changed from when I worked in equipment with Joseph to where I was at Fresno State. But the real connection was Sam Curtis, which was Joseph Wood's right-hand [man]," Harris says. "He worked at Georgia with Marshall Malchow, so he called Marshall for any names, any recommendations. Marshall recommended me, and I went through the interview process with Sam, Joseph Wood and Coach Helton."
Meanwhile, Helton had lost not only Ziskin but also director of recruiting Alex Rios that previous fall -- the two had largely divided the key responsibilities of the operation as it was then constructed -- and it was time for a total reset of the recruiting department.
"Our business is based off student-athletes and being able to acquire exceptional student-athletes, so that position is ultra imperative to your success as a head coach as well as a university athletic department. So that's probably why it took us a little bit of time. It took me as much time as the strength and conditioning coach did -- I just felt like it was so important to get the right guy in there and to go through the process rather than rushing it that I interviewed a lot of folks and wanted to get it right," Helton says. "And I know we got it right with Spencer."
He says the initial pitch for the restructuring of the department was "maybe a little bit on a more limited scale" but the vision presented was clear.
"The first piece was acquiring Spencer and then trying to put the other pieces in place," he says.
Again, the resources simply weren't there at the time to do it all.
So Harris began by transforming the Trojans' player evaluation process while implementing the parts of his plan he could within the staff constraints. The rest would require yet another fortuitous intersection, in the arrival of Bohn and Sosna by the end of the 2019 season.
It's no coincidence that after years of USC's understaffed recruiting department being a topic of discussion for fans and media, with Helton deftly deflecting questions about it whenever prodded by reporters, that upon putting a new athletics administration in place the Trojans were suddenly able to find the previously elusive answers. In a little more than a year, that department has grown from five full-time staffers to 11, including a substantial investment in graphic design and video content creators to meet the needs of recruiting in this digital, social-media-driven age.
Whenever Helton has been asked what changed suddenly following Bohn's hiring that allowed those long-overlooked needs to now be addressed, he's consistently reiterated the same answer -- the question finally came up internally (and not just from reporters).
"Being given the opportunity and really got asked the question by Mike and [USC President] Dr. [Carol] Folt when they first got here, 'Coach, what do you need?' That's where the vision kind of started -- 'This is where we're currently at and this is where we would like to go,'" he says. "And it wasn't solved in Day 1, and it's still an ongoing process and we know as college football changes you have to change and adapt with it. As technology changes, you have to change and adapt with it. But I appreciate Mike and Dr. Folt in asking the question -- 'Coach, what do you need?' ...
"It doesn't mean they're going to say 'Yes' every time. I can say this, they haven't said 'No' many times."
Little did Harris know at the time that he was about to meet not only someone who shared and appreciated his vision, but one who could actually bring the rest of it to full fruition.
"In that first year, we did make a big impact, but we still had our challenges," he says. "And then a new administration comes in, and really I've probably benefited the most from them coming in, in my opinion."
With Ziskin, the Trojans also had a full-time dedicated point man who had his hand in everything from his primary role of player evaluation and scouting to also at times leading communication with prospects and high schools -- a do-it-all job he once described as demanding 100-110 hours a week during peak months.
Before his own departure in September of 2018, Rios helped split those duties while leading more of the direct recruiting responsibilities.
And there were other key cogs as well. It's not as if USC was barren in the recruiting office. Trey Johnson, who just left last month for his alma mater Tennessee, had joined USC in the summer of 2018 as another talent evaluator by trade who would eventually spend a long stretch also manning the Trojans' social media accounts out of necessity. Assistant AD/player development Gavin Morris, an impactful recruiter, has been a fixture in the program for a while, but he's kind of his own entity, reporting directly to Helton.
But other programs -- programs like Alabama that influence the model USC is now building -- already had what comparatively seemed like a recruiting army.
A 2018 feature story in Al.com described Saban's early recruiting departments at Alabama upon his arrival now 14 years ago as "an incubator for support staff that was revolutionary in the world of college football ... that included arms for marketing, graphic design and scouting" and "an intricate system in which both in-person assessments and highlight-reel appraisals circulate between multiple people, ensuring that a consensus opinion is formed about an individual prospect."
Again, that was the model in which Harris had been groomed.
"I think it's overall just the idea of a personnel department," Harris says. "I think it's grown a ton over the last 5-10 years, but I still think most college programs are behind. But really, it's empowering people to make evaluation decisions, and then your evaluation process, what categories are you evaluating players in? You hear the term a lot, critical factors, the five items you look for in a player at every position. That all stems from I think the Saban model, so I think it's just the idea of hiring people in the football program that are purely focused on player evaluation and recruiting and that's something that just didn't exist probably eight years ago."
It was that concept that struck Helton as "outside-the-box thinking" in Harris' interview with the USC head coach.
"I think the question was, 'What does your ideal department look like?' And obviously it was more bodies than what USC had, and that's not necessarily realistic, but more so it was, 'How are you going to implement what you want to do?'" Harris recalls. "So what I bring to the table in my opinion, not only is it the player evaluation and the decision-making, but it's the organization. That's the biggest piece of my role is there is so much going on in recruiting multiple classes, so many names, so many different activities, so many different people involved, and it's the programs that can be most organized and efficient in what they're trying to accomplish that have the most success. And that's really what I pitched throughout the process."
Efficiency is a key component to all of this and a go-to buzzword among those with their fingerprints on the restructuring of USC recruiting.
Sosna expounded on that in sharing his perspective on the football staff and recruiting department overhauls since his arrival.
"Over the last 14 months we've worked with Clay and Spencer to make available a certain amount of resources for recruiting, and our challenge has been to deploy those resources as strategically and efficiently as possible to maximize the return," he explains. "And that emphasis so far has been on personnel and probably the branding elements of recruiting and program building, but simultaneously we've developed a recruiting structure to extract more value from what was already in place. So often the focus is on adding resources, but you can make just as much if not more progress through optimization, so I think that's what Spencer has helped us thrive at and the results in the 2021 cycle were a product of that effort. ...
"You can't keep doing things a certain way because that's how you've always done them or it's how you won in the past. I think the reality for us is we're resource-disadvantaged compared to the national peers that we're often held against, and it's well-documented that our conference distribution is significantly less than most of our Power 5 peers, especially those in the Big Ten and the SEC. So not only do we have fewer available resources than they do, when you apply cost of living conversions the variance is dramatic. So we're not going to out-resource our competition nationally, so we really have to be more creative, innovative, strategic and efficient. We have to leverage the competitive advantages we do possess, and I think that's been a major point of emphasis for us in developing our vision and strategy."
As for the old way of doing things, college programs around the country have certainly evolved -- maybe more recently in most cases and to varying degrees, as Harris suggested -- in terms of recruiting infrastructure and alleviating some of the scouting and recruiting-related organizational burdens from the assistant coaches. That in itself is not revolutionary in 2021 -- it's the whole reason many were raising questions about the size of USC's recruiting department in the first place -- and even still, the Trojans already had dedicated personnel like Ziskin, Rios and Co., doing a version of the job.
What the Trojans have tried to build now, though, in adopting the pro-model personnel department, is a more streamlined flow chart of responsibilities emanating from Harris' overall direction, certainly with more tentacles than existed before, and in all areas more specialization of focus.
To sum it up as concisely as possible ...
USC no longer has the "recruiting coordinator" title attached to an assistant coach, it no longer has one of its key scouting staffers running Twitter, it now has separate dedicated scouting coordinators for both offense and defense (working under Harris' overall lead) who collaborate with those respective coaches on identifying recruits to pursue, it has a dedicated director of high school relations (which seemed to be one of Ziskin's dozens of hats during his tenure), a director of recruiting strategy to devise individual recruiting plans for prospects and coordinate the social media elements of that process, a director of recruiting operations to coordinate logistics and on-campus events with prospects, and separate directors of football creative media, graphic design and video production.
And still Morris, a position unto himself as an impactful relationship-builder/direct recruiter/mentor for players in the program.
"If you take the NFL model and truly have a personnel general manager that also handles the coordination of communications, evaluations, technology, now you've become a master of your craft in that area," Helton says. "So in doing so I loved the idea, I loved to be able to hand it off to a person that that's their primary objective each and every day, every second of the day, and then surrounding them with elite people whether it is recruiters, whether it is video production artists, graphic design artists, on-campus relations, being able to surround them with great people, it really has helped us immensely over the last two years."
However the finances shake out -- USC doesn't have to disclose such details as a private university -- ultimately what this makeover required more than anything was a full buy-in to the plan and vision.
The day after USC's humbling loss to Iowa in the 2019 Holiday Bowl, capping a mediocre 8-5 season, weeks after the entirety of that small 2020 recruiting class was locked in during the early signing period, Sosna met with Wood to start taking stock of the program and what it needed.
That soon led to a meeting with Harris about the specific needs in the recruiting department.
Sosna says he had no preconceived notions upon arriving from Cincinnati shortly after Bohn was hired. He knew what the results were, he didn't yet know all the factors or the personnel at play, and he wanted to go in open-minded about all of it.
And he quickly came to appreciate Harris' potential in the same way Helton had some eight months earlier in making the hire.
"I think very quickly on in meetings with Clay and Joseph Wood and Spencer Harris, it was very clear that there was consensus about the opportunities for improvement that were in front of us. And what I recognized very quickly is that Spencer is an extraordinary talent. There's a reason that he earned one of the top 5 recruiting jobs in all of college football at 26 years old," Sosna says.
"In the director of player personnel role, you want someone who is elite at talent evaluation, organizing the recruiting process, developing your overall recruiting strategy, leveraging modern technologies and recruiting practices while also commanding the respect of and earning trust from the coaching staff. Ideally your director of player personnel will be able to do one or a few of those things at an extremely high level. The thing about Spencer is he does them all. ... So we have a high degree of confidence in the direction of our recruiting program because we have such incredible trust and belief in Spencer."
Just as notable was the implicit understanding of what Harris wanted to build and how the proposed new positions they discussed were essential to advancing the department.
Between his stints in the athletic department at Cincinnati, Sosna spent two years with the Cleveland Browns, including a promotion in 2018 to the role of salary cap and contract analyst.
Needless to say, he understood the concept of a pro-model personnel department.
"He articulated well through the structure and the organization, but you have to remember I'm very familiar with the pro model having been in those rooms for two seasons with the Browns and experienced that process under the direction of probably one of the most brilliant talent evaluators in football over the last decade in John Dorsey. So I think I was predisposed, not to having an idea about what we should do per se, but certainly intuitively understood what it is that they are trying to accomplish," Sosna says.
"I know that there's a lot made of the size of recruiting and support staffs relative to our national peers and our conference peers, but we were laser focused on constructing the right format for USC."
This may have been a dream career path for Harris, as he had put it, and probably a dream opportunity he walked into at USC, but there were probably better adjectives to describe that first year and the culmination of the 2020 recruiting cycle.
In finishing in that tie for 71st in the 2020 Rivals recruiting rankings with Louisiana Tech, USC -- one of the most historically successful college football programs in the country, situated in one of the most fertile recruiting territories nationally -- had finished behind the likes of Marshall, Bowling Green, Rutgers, Florida Atlantic, every other Pac-12 program and so on.
A lot of that had to do with the size of USC's class -- the Trojans ended up with those 12 signees in part due to limited available scholarships (a 13th never made it to campus) -- but just as much also had to do with missing on many top local prospects in a way that USC was unaccustomed.
While Harris had walked in midway through the cycle and was working against some preexisting factors, the results stung nonetheless. But there was no time to dwell -- and no need to as he could see the necessary resources suddenly falling into place.
"There was a lot of things that went into what the final result of that class was -- really that prior season, all the change that occurred afterwards. That culminated to a rough 2020 finish for our recruiting class. It was in my first kind of six months here, but really recruiting classes, the foundation is set almost a year and a half, two years before. But when those types of events occur and you have such a pivotal role in it, to me, you can go two ways -- you can blame other people or it can light a fire under you," Harris says.
"And that's how I took it and I think the rest of our department and our head coach took it was, what are we going to do to fix this so this never happens again? ... I think we looked inward and obviously having the support from this new administration and investing in making some changes played a massive, massive role in the 2020-21 difference in recruiting."
So as that restructuring process was unfolding behind the scenes over the last year, the Trojans were just as importantly swaying the very public perception problem that lingered through that 2020 recruiting cycle.
The hiring of Williams as cornerbacks coach, prying him away from Oregon where he had already established himself as one of the top recruiters in the country, was the first sign of a new aggressive approach for USC.
Not only were the Trojans going to target the top high school recruits across the country -- they were going to target the top recruiters.
Williams would deliver on all of the hype and expectations that accompanied his hiring in February, 2020, playing a lead role in USC signing 5-star defensive end Korey Foreman (once committed to Clemson), 4-star Rivals100 linebacker Raesjon Davis (once committed to LSU), fellow 4-star linebacker Julien Simon, 4-star Rivals100 WR Kyron Ware-Hudson (who flipped from a long-standing commitment to Oregon), 4-star cornerbacks Ceyair Wright and Prophet Brown, 4-star nickel Jaylin Smith, and teaming with safeties coach Craig Naivar to land 4-star standouts Calen Bullock, Xamarion Gordon and Anthony Beavers. (Naivar also proved to be a dynamic addition to the recruiting efforts this last year, and defensive line coach Vic So'oto was significant in Foreman's recruitment while putting in time building a relationship from scratch there as his future position coach).
Williams' ability to reel in Brown, the No. 8-ranked CB in the class and the No. 118 national prospect overall, last July was one of the early recruiting wins in particular that stood out and signaled that the Trojans were again heading in the right direction.
"We were not in first place for Prophet Brown. We thought he was headed to Oklahoma, they had done a great job recruiting him," Harris recalls. "And Donte turned that around really quickly. He builds a relationship with him and before we could even blink really Prophet was committing to us."
Williams is his own story, but this one certainly can't be told without him.
Now with his recent promotion to associate head coach he is going to be even more involved in recruiting some of the Trojans' top offensive targets in this 2022 class and beyond.
"Donte obviously has a lot of strengths, is a very unique person, especially when it comes to recruiting. Not only is he a very natural relationship-builder, really good football coach, but his work ethic is through the roof," Harris says. "I've spoken on how competitive I am and how badly I want to win, and Donte is the exact same way. Him and I are on the phone all the time and it's really just about how we can win, and what do we need to do to win."
Harris was asked if, looking back, there was one definitive turning point in the 2021 recruiting cycle where he knew things were going to be different. He says he can't pinpoint one because every commitment win felt like a major step to the Trojans re-establishing the program to its more familiar stature.
Really, it started with the productive junior day event on campus right as the 2020 cycle was winding down -- with USC's focus already on what it had to do to rebound in 2021 -- followed by the buzz created by the new hires on the defensive side. The commitment of local 4-star offensive tackle Mason Murphy last March was the beginning of a wave of momentum that would carry through the summer with USC spending a good amount of time inside the top 5 of the recruiting rankings.
Even still, the question remained publicly -- could USC again land the truly elite 5-star talent that had been the foundation of the program for so many years?
That answer came late one night in mid-December when Foreman, the No. 3-ranked national prospect from just up the road in Corona, let Morris know he was staying home and picking the Trojans over the likes of Clemson, LSU and Georgia. It had to be kept secret, though, because he was scheduled to reveal his decision live on national TV on Jan. 2 as part of the All-American Bowl spotlight show.
As the story goes, only Morris, Harris, Helton and a compliance staffer would know in the meantime. (Foreman especially wanted to surprise Williams, his lead recruiter).
"Gavin Morris called me at midnight on the Thursday of the three-day signing period pretty much crying saying that Korey is ready to sign with us," Harris recalls. "And then that process of keeping it quiet and keeping it between three or four people, but knowing that we signed Korey Foreman, what we feel is the No. 1 player in the country, keeping him home, knowing that he's going to wear 0 and knowing that we have two weeks to make a bad-ass video for him and build up this Jan. 2 announcement and hoping on that Jan. 2 announcement we were going to get Ceyair Wright too, and knowing that getting those two meant we'd probably have a great chance of getting Raesjon Davis for National Signing Day in February ... that moment just triggered a lot, and it validated so much of the work that we put in, so much of that time, investment, change.
"From that 2020 early signing day to 13 months later to sign Korey Foreman and to put together a top 10 recruiting class was just monumental for this program and where we're going and what we still have left to achieve. But it signals a major step forward for us."
Again, the Trojans weren't just hunting for top recruits -- but more top recruiters as well.
Texas had just fired head coach Tom Herman and there was thought that USC might be able to make a run at Bryan Carrington, who was Herman's director of recruiting and had made a name for himself nationally.
Harris and Sosna started exchanging text messages that next day, Jan. 3, talking about it.
They weren't sure yet what role they would pursue him for or how exactly it would all work, nor did it matter. It was an opportunity to add another dynamic recruiter to the staff -- the details could be figured out later and they were willing to get creative.
"It was like, 'OK, what's next?'" Sosna recalls.
One prospect from Texas' 2020 recruiting class described Carrington as a pivotal figure for many of the signees that year, and in a fitting bit of irony he was integral in recruiting 2019 5-star WR Bru McCoy, who signed with USC, transferred to Texas for spring ball and then transferred back to USC. With the Trojans already making a major emphasis on recruiting Texas, Carrington's ties there were valuable, but he had also shown he was not geographically limited in his reach.
The pursuit was on, and by the end of the month, USC was hosting Carrington on a visit, making a recruiting pitch to the recruiter.
And an effective one at that.
Later the following week, it was a done deal -- Carrington, who had ambitions to segue more into the coaching side, would leave Texas for a quality control analyst job at USC, where he'll assist running backs coach Mike Jinks and also have his hand in the Trojans' recruiting efforts.
"I joke with Spencer too that if we didn't end up getting Carrington I was going to be extremely devastated because it was by far the best recruiting pitch I've ever given," Sosna says. "... I joked with Bryan that I've never seen a head coach, associate head coach, defensive coordinator, safeties coach, director of player personnel, director of player development and whoever else all involved in recruiting a potential quality control analyst into the program.
"But I thought there was a healthy dose of irony that here we are putting on essentially a recruiting visit for somebody who has mastered the art of recruiting, himself. So I think the fact that we had success tells you something about our ability to do that."
Inside the building, it felt like further affirmation that the narrative around the program had indeed changed quite a bit in a short amount of time if both highly-coveted 5-star prospects and nationally-regarded staffers alike believed enough in the direction of USC football to commit their immediate futures to it.
The Trojans weren't done, though.
Right around the time the Carrington news was breaking on social media, Morris responded to a tweet from Jeff Martin, LSU's assistant director of on-campus recruiting operations, with a prophetic message -- "We coming for you next."
That was on Feb. 4, and a few weeks later Martin was indeed leaving his alma mater to join the Trojans as the director of scouting and player relations.
"I think it was a very similar set of circumstances, connecting with somebody who has aspirations for himself and his career and a credit to Clay that he was able to really quickly form a strong connection with Jeff and collaborate on a vision that will be able to allow Jeff to get to places that he wants to go," Sosna says. "I think we very quickly formed that strong relationship with him, and he already had so many existing relationships within the program that we were able to rather swiftly get to a point that we were able to make this work."
Martin had the connection with Morris and also had worked with USC assistant director of football video production Will Stout, whom USC had poached from LSU last spring as part of assembling its new football-specific video team.
"Jeff Martin had a prior relationship with Gavin, and I had the opportunity to go through the interview process with Jeff and I came away blown away," Harris says. "He is an extremely impressive individual with very lofty goals and had his hand in a lot of aspects of the LSU football program. I knew that if we brought him to 'SC and brought him to Los Angeles in a personnel role, that he would make a really positive impact on our program, not only from a personnel side, player evaluation side, which he will have a major part in, but just his way of thinking and the type of impact he wants to make on recruits and student-athletes' lives from a development standpoint will be really beneficial to us. And then obviously he's got some ties to an area of the country that we would like to grow our footprint."
Meanwhile, the Trojans had also plucked Marshall Cherrington away from Cal to be their director of recruiting strategy. A USC alum making a name for himself elsewhere in the conference, he had long been on Harris' radar and suddenly the Trojans were again a very enticing career move for a young up-and-comer in the business.
The overall plan has evolved even since that initial planning meeting between Sosna and Harris coming off the end of the 2019 season, and surely from what Harris pitched to Helton in his interview, but the guiding philosophy has not.
"Since we added the positions to bolster our recruiting department, we haven't created any new ones. Every hire we've made this offseason has been a 1-to-1 replacement for a position that has been vacated. However, we believe in selecting for talent, so when presented with an opportunity to acquire talent like Bryan Carrington or Marshall Cherrington or Jeff Martin, we're not trying to fit somebody into a very specific role when they can do something different," Sosna says. "We want to align the strengths of our personnel with what they do everyday and how they can best make an impact on our program. So it's not the type of situation where you have to fit specifically in the role that you're replacing and take on the exact responsibilities that a departed staff member may have been executing. At the end of the day we want to get the best people in the building."
So how does it all add up? With the final vacancies in that recruiting department being formally filled this month, here's how it all falls into place.
So, then, does this current construction meet the full vision Harris had for the personnel department he aimed to build here?
"I would say it's pretty damn close," he says. "What we've built over just the last 12 months here going from five full-time to now it's 11 in our recruiting personnel department, the administration has been extremely supportive of what we are trying to accomplish. From my position, it's been a challenge -- we created some of these positions over a year ago, and trying to hire through COVID was really tough and trying to get people to move to Los Angeles, we [didn't] know if the season is happening -- so then to make some hires and get through the season and be able to hit the restart button and finish out this staff, I'm extremely excited about where it's going and what our potential is. I think that's the most exciting part -- it's not that we made these hires, it's what we are trying to accomplish.
"It's just everybody, they have very descriptive and specific responsibilities and we can become experts in our field. Drew Fox can become an expert in just personnel. Gavin Morris can become an expert in the relationship-building aspect. Megan Mueller is going to be our director of recruiting operations, she can focus on just her responsibility. So we can just operate so much more efficiently in all aspects of the recruiting process, which as I talked about earlier there's just so much going on, the more people you have involved, who are great people and are going to work their tails off and are all-in but no ego, humble and hungry, we can help this program, our head coach, our assistant coaches achieve our goals at the highest level."
The final question went to Sosna -- does USC's recruiting department makeover feel finished at this point?
"The job is never finished," he says matter-of-factly.
Behind the scenes of USC's recruiting rebuild with those leading the charge
The narrative has been well told by now, how USC shook off its unthinkable Class of 2020 recruiting struggles, hired a new defensive staff featuring one of the top recruiters in the country in Donte Williams, rejuvenated its momentum and reversed its fortunes with the No. 8-ranked 2021 signing class.
But the origin of USC's recruiting reboot was actually obscured by the shadow of that preceding nadir.
Early in 2019, as a variety of factors were driving the Trojans toward their lowest-ranked recruiting finish on record (tied for 71st nationally, last in the Pac-12), the groundwork for the future was also being set.
After seeing his already undermanned recruiting staff lose its axis of operation with the departure of Eric Ziskin, USC coach Clay Helton would take his time filling the post, eventually hiring a 26-year-old from Fresno State named Spencer Harris, and in so doing setting a new strategic course for the department.
It's understandable if those on the outside didn't see at the time the future crystallizing in that hire in April of 2019, but behind the scenes a shift was underway, rooted in interweaving connections and influences that thread from Tuscaloosa, Ala., to Seattle to Athens, Ga., and back to Los Angeles.
Not to mention a series of dominos to come that couldn't have been known then.
More on that in a bit, but the first of those dominos was USC turning the reigns of what should be one of the more desirable recruiting jobs in the country over to an under-the-radar upstart who a handful of years earlier had gotten his entry into college football as an ambitious equipment manager at Washington.
Two years in, with the perspective of everything that has unfolded since, that hire is looking like an inspired -- and pivotal -- decision.
"It's OK to be young and talented," Helton says over the phone last week, reflecting back on the first move of what has become a significant reconstruction of his recruiting staff. "There's a lot of good men and women that are looking for their breakout opportunity that are really talented at what they do and they're just looking for that chance. And those that are willing to take a risk on that talent and what that person is made up of are going to reap the rewards. And I really felt that with Spencer.
"In interviewing a bunch of folks for the position and then having a chance to sit down with Spencer, I loved his work ethic, I loved his talent at the position, I loved his big-picture aspiration and his vision of that department. And it was outside-the-box thinking. I just felt, 'Wow, this guy, he's got it.'"
Not knowing the full scope of who USC considered for the role -- or more to the point, who considered USC -- it's hard to gauge exactly how appealing the job was nationally in that moment.
The Trojans had just gone 5-7 the previous fall, Helton's future looked cloudier than ever -- factors that would contribute greatly to the outcome of that already-in-the-works 2020 signing class -- and it was widely known that USC's recruiting staff was lagging well behind its national peers in terms of size and resources.
Harris was aware of all of that as well, but he's also intrinsically competitive and had found his calling in a job that can be a tireless grind no matter what the extenuating circumstances. Years earlier, he had quit a finance internship to rejoin the football program at Washington (after his initial equipment manager stint) while still in school there. An opportunity on the player personnel side had opened and Harris saw quickly the career he wanted to pursue. A former captain of his high school football team, his preference was always for a future in athletics, and he found a fresh outlet for competition in the world of recruiting and the idea of playing an essential role in building the rosters that would ultimately decide wins and losses on the field.
Having spent two years at Fresno State while moving onto more responsibility after his start with the Huskies, he now saw the next opportunity to continue his rapid ascent in the business and help chart the future for one of college football's marquee brands.
"I really felt I was ready for the next opportunity and the next challenge. And yes, I knew USC had challenges. They were just coming off the 5-7 2018 year, I knew that they were understaffed, I knew that the perception wasn't great. But still, it was USC," Harris says, looking back. "... I enjoyed my time with Coach Helton and felt like he was going to empower me to build this department and make a big positive impact on how we evaluate players, on what our process is, on how we operate our business."
Essentially, Harris wanted to bring what he describes as a pro-model personnel department to USC. He traces the genesis back to what Nick Saban installed at Alabama after returning from his time in the NFL with the Miami Dolphins. One of Harris' mentors at Washington, Marshall Malchow -- now the associate AD for football at Texas A&M -- had been wired just like Harris as a student at Alabama, eager to find a place and future in the sport while pouncing at an entry-level position with the Crimson Tide early in Saban's tenure. His weaving path eventually landed him at Washington, where he taught the tools and philosophy to Harris, and it's that vision and model that Harris would then pitch in his interview at USC.
It's a vision that has come into full focus over the last 14 months, not only in terms of recruiting results but through the commitment from athletic director Mike Bohn and associate AD Brandon Sosna upon their arrival in late 2019 to start turning Harris' ideal plans into tangible reality, essentially doubling the size of his department and making some recent power-play moves to bolster USC's growing arsenal of acclaimed recruiters.
With that augmented infrastructure now fully aligning with Harris' plans, those inside the program would like to think the signing day results this year were merely the start of the Trojans' climb back to a more familiar and consistent perch atop the recruiting rankings.
"His vision has come into play," Helton reiterates. "And when vision and resources come together -- his vision as well as the resources that Mike and Brandon have provided us -- that creates special things."
'I pretty much knew immediately that this was going to be my career path'
With National Signing Day a few weeks in the rearview and able to take a half hour away from his myriad responsibilities as USC's director of player personnel, Harris got on the phone with TrojanSports.com a couple weeks ago and started the story at the beginning.While playing a variety of sports growing up in Sacramento, football had always stood out most for him. And when it came time to pick a college there was one overriding criteria that had to be checked.
"A big sports school was a requirement. I was a high academic student so that was a requirement as well, but I wasn't going to Cal Poly or an Ivy League -- I was going to a school with a major sports following, so I ended up going to the University of Washington," he recalls. "I went the business school route, was in finance, but my whole life was like, if I can work in sports in my career that is the ideal path. I grew up loving Jerry Maguire -- I want[ed] to be an agent."
His first taste of the business was far from such glamor.
One of his fraternity brothers was working with the Huskies football program as an equipment manager and introduced Harris to his boss. Harris would start the spring semester of his freshman year and spend a couple seasons in that role, while forming an important connection for the future with Joseph Wood, who was an assistant on the Washington football equipment staff then and is now USC's assistant AD for football/chief of staff.
"Being an equipment manager, it's a great entry point into college athletics. If you look at our staff now, I was the equipment manager, [new USC director of recruiting strategy] Marshall Cherrington was an equipment manager, [new director of scouting and player relations] Jeff Martin was an equipment manager, Joseph Wood was an equipment manager," Harris says.
That said, it ultimately wasn't what he wanted to do -- not specifically.
"Really cool opportunity to be around the program, be involved in it, but at the end of the day I didn't love the actual work of being an equipment manager, so I said 'I don't think this is for me, I'm going to go into the finance world.' So I ended up quitting that job," Harris recalls. "My last season as equipment manager was Coach Sark's last year, he went to 'SC after that, coach Chris Petersen gets hired and six months later the same fraternity brother who got me into the equipment manager job, he started working upstairs in the football office and he told me about the position, what he's doing working in recruiting and it sounded extremely intriguing -- much more aligned with what I would like to be doing, using my brain and being much more involved in the football operation. So I quit my finance internship and started interning with UW football."
Petersen had first hired Malchow at Boise State in 2012, and he'd bring him along to Seattle as well in 2014. While none of that had anything to do with USC at all, it was the first of several pivotal confluences that would factor in for the Trojans down the road.
"This was the summer going into my senior year of college. And I met the director of player personnel from UW football who had just gotten there," Harris says, telling the story. "Marshall was a pioneer in this player personnel industry. He was a student at Alabama and interned at Alabama in kind of the early-ish Nick Saban days, winning national championships, and when Saban came from the Dolphins he brought the NFL personnel model to college. That's where all of this started was when Saban left the Dolphins and came to Alabama. ...
"Long story short, as soon as I met Marshall and someone else that he brought with him named Aaron Knotts, who's still the chief of staff at Washington, he kind of lifted the hood on player personnel, recruiting, player evaluation. I pretty much knew immediately that this was going to be my career path. This was now senior year in college. So I spent the rest of college and really about nine months after I graduated college learning everything I could from Marshall Malchow and Aaron Knotts, and spending as many hours as I could up there in the office, building relationships with the coaching staff, building relationships with Coach Pete and working as hard as I could with these two mentors, and it was just kind of a perfect fit for my personality. Not only the passion for football, but also the passion for decision-making, competitiveness. Recruiting is so competitive and you get to play such an essential role in building a roster, and the fact that I can have a role in winning football games by bringing the best football players in was kind of a dream opportunity for me."
At Washington, Harris went from holding the title of recruiting specialist in 2014 to head recruiting specialist in 2015 and ultimately assistant director of player personnel in 2016 before moving on to the director of player personnel role at Fresno State the next two years.
When the USC position came open with Ziskin stepping aside as the assistant AD for recruiting and player personnel -- he'd explain then that it was no longer a job he saw himself doing long-term -- the relationships Harris had built helped position him as a candidate for a major career move.
By that point, Malchow had rejoined Kirby Smart -- who had been the defensive coordinator at Alabama during his time there -- at Georgia. Harris' connection to Wood, who had then become USC's executive director of football operations and chief of staff, helped, but perhaps even more important was a connection that then-USC director of football operations Sam Curtis had with Malchow. All the dots started connecting for Harris and USC.
"Joseph Wood knew who I was, obviously we worked in equipment together, so a lot had changed from when I worked in equipment with Joseph to where I was at Fresno State. But the real connection was Sam Curtis, which was Joseph Wood's right-hand [man]," Harris says. "He worked at Georgia with Marshall Malchow, so he called Marshall for any names, any recommendations. Marshall recommended me, and I went through the interview process with Sam, Joseph Wood and Coach Helton."
Meanwhile, Helton had lost not only Ziskin but also director of recruiting Alex Rios that previous fall -- the two had largely divided the key responsibilities of the operation as it was then constructed -- and it was time for a total reset of the recruiting department.
"Our business is based off student-athletes and being able to acquire exceptional student-athletes, so that position is ultra imperative to your success as a head coach as well as a university athletic department. So that's probably why it took us a little bit of time. It took me as much time as the strength and conditioning coach did -- I just felt like it was so important to get the right guy in there and to go through the process rather than rushing it that I interviewed a lot of folks and wanted to get it right," Helton says. "And I know we got it right with Spencer."
He says the initial pitch for the restructuring of the department was "maybe a little bit on a more limited scale" but the vision presented was clear.
"The first piece was acquiring Spencer and then trying to put the other pieces in place," he says.
Again, the resources simply weren't there at the time to do it all.
So Harris began by transforming the Trojans' player evaluation process while implementing the parts of his plan he could within the staff constraints. The rest would require yet another fortuitous intersection, in the arrival of Bohn and Sosna by the end of the 2019 season.
It's no coincidence that after years of USC's understaffed recruiting department being a topic of discussion for fans and media, with Helton deftly deflecting questions about it whenever prodded by reporters, that upon putting a new athletics administration in place the Trojans were suddenly able to find the previously elusive answers. In a little more than a year, that department has grown from five full-time staffers to 11, including a substantial investment in graphic design and video content creators to meet the needs of recruiting in this digital, social-media-driven age.
Whenever Helton has been asked what changed suddenly following Bohn's hiring that allowed those long-overlooked needs to now be addressed, he's consistently reiterated the same answer -- the question finally came up internally (and not just from reporters).
"Being given the opportunity and really got asked the question by Mike and [USC President] Dr. [Carol] Folt when they first got here, 'Coach, what do you need?' That's where the vision kind of started -- 'This is where we're currently at and this is where we would like to go,'" he says. "And it wasn't solved in Day 1, and it's still an ongoing process and we know as college football changes you have to change and adapt with it. As technology changes, you have to change and adapt with it. But I appreciate Mike and Dr. Folt in asking the question -- 'Coach, what do you need?' ...
"It doesn't mean they're going to say 'Yes' every time. I can say this, they haven't said 'No' many times."
Little did Harris know at the time that he was about to meet not only someone who shared and appreciated his vision, but one who could actually bring the rest of it to full fruition.
"In that first year, we did make a big impact, but we still had our challenges," he says. "And then a new administration comes in, and really I've probably benefited the most from them coming in, in my opinion."
Origins in the 'Saban model'
The way of business for college programs forever was to have an assistant coach double as the "recruiting coordinator" -- a title USC most recently attached to then-linebackers coach Johnny Nansen from 2016-18 -- supplemented by whatever additional recruiting staff was in place.With Ziskin, the Trojans also had a full-time dedicated point man who had his hand in everything from his primary role of player evaluation and scouting to also at times leading communication with prospects and high schools -- a do-it-all job he once described as demanding 100-110 hours a week during peak months.
Before his own departure in September of 2018, Rios helped split those duties while leading more of the direct recruiting responsibilities.
And there were other key cogs as well. It's not as if USC was barren in the recruiting office. Trey Johnson, who just left last month for his alma mater Tennessee, had joined USC in the summer of 2018 as another talent evaluator by trade who would eventually spend a long stretch also manning the Trojans' social media accounts out of necessity. Assistant AD/player development Gavin Morris, an impactful recruiter, has been a fixture in the program for a while, but he's kind of his own entity, reporting directly to Helton.
But other programs -- programs like Alabama that influence the model USC is now building -- already had what comparatively seemed like a recruiting army.
A 2018 feature story in Al.com described Saban's early recruiting departments at Alabama upon his arrival now 14 years ago as "an incubator for support staff that was revolutionary in the world of college football ... that included arms for marketing, graphic design and scouting" and "an intricate system in which both in-person assessments and highlight-reel appraisals circulate between multiple people, ensuring that a consensus opinion is formed about an individual prospect."
Again, that was the model in which Harris had been groomed.
"I think it's overall just the idea of a personnel department," Harris says. "I think it's grown a ton over the last 5-10 years, but I still think most college programs are behind. But really, it's empowering people to make evaluation decisions, and then your evaluation process, what categories are you evaluating players in? You hear the term a lot, critical factors, the five items you look for in a player at every position. That all stems from I think the Saban model, so I think it's just the idea of hiring people in the football program that are purely focused on player evaluation and recruiting and that's something that just didn't exist probably eight years ago."
It was that concept that struck Helton as "outside-the-box thinking" in Harris' interview with the USC head coach.
"I think the question was, 'What does your ideal department look like?' And obviously it was more bodies than what USC had, and that's not necessarily realistic, but more so it was, 'How are you going to implement what you want to do?'" Harris recalls. "So what I bring to the table in my opinion, not only is it the player evaluation and the decision-making, but it's the organization. That's the biggest piece of my role is there is so much going on in recruiting multiple classes, so many names, so many different activities, so many different people involved, and it's the programs that can be most organized and efficient in what they're trying to accomplish that have the most success. And that's really what I pitched throughout the process."
Efficiency is a key component to all of this and a go-to buzzword among those with their fingerprints on the restructuring of USC recruiting.
Sosna expounded on that in sharing his perspective on the football staff and recruiting department overhauls since his arrival.
"Over the last 14 months we've worked with Clay and Spencer to make available a certain amount of resources for recruiting, and our challenge has been to deploy those resources as strategically and efficiently as possible to maximize the return," he explains. "And that emphasis so far has been on personnel and probably the branding elements of recruiting and program building, but simultaneously we've developed a recruiting structure to extract more value from what was already in place. So often the focus is on adding resources, but you can make just as much if not more progress through optimization, so I think that's what Spencer has helped us thrive at and the results in the 2021 cycle were a product of that effort. ...
"You can't keep doing things a certain way because that's how you've always done them or it's how you won in the past. I think the reality for us is we're resource-disadvantaged compared to the national peers that we're often held against, and it's well-documented that our conference distribution is significantly less than most of our Power 5 peers, especially those in the Big Ten and the SEC. So not only do we have fewer available resources than they do, when you apply cost of living conversions the variance is dramatic. So we're not going to out-resource our competition nationally, so we really have to be more creative, innovative, strategic and efficient. We have to leverage the competitive advantages we do possess, and I think that's been a major point of emphasis for us in developing our vision and strategy."
As for the old way of doing things, college programs around the country have certainly evolved -- maybe more recently in most cases and to varying degrees, as Harris suggested -- in terms of recruiting infrastructure and alleviating some of the scouting and recruiting-related organizational burdens from the assistant coaches. That in itself is not revolutionary in 2021 -- it's the whole reason many were raising questions about the size of USC's recruiting department in the first place -- and even still, the Trojans already had dedicated personnel like Ziskin, Rios and Co., doing a version of the job.
What the Trojans have tried to build now, though, in adopting the pro-model personnel department, is a more streamlined flow chart of responsibilities emanating from Harris' overall direction, certainly with more tentacles than existed before, and in all areas more specialization of focus.
To sum it up as concisely as possible ...
USC no longer has the "recruiting coordinator" title attached to an assistant coach, it no longer has one of its key scouting staffers running Twitter, it now has separate dedicated scouting coordinators for both offense and defense (working under Harris' overall lead) who collaborate with those respective coaches on identifying recruits to pursue, it has a dedicated director of high school relations (which seemed to be one of Ziskin's dozens of hats during his tenure), a director of recruiting strategy to devise individual recruiting plans for prospects and coordinate the social media elements of that process, a director of recruiting operations to coordinate logistics and on-campus events with prospects, and separate directors of football creative media, graphic design and video production.
And still Morris, a position unto himself as an impactful relationship-builder/direct recruiter/mentor for players in the program.
"If you take the NFL model and truly have a personnel general manager that also handles the coordination of communications, evaluations, technology, now you've become a master of your craft in that area," Helton says. "So in doing so I loved the idea, I loved to be able to hand it off to a person that that's their primary objective each and every day, every second of the day, and then surrounding them with elite people whether it is recruiters, whether it is video production artists, graphic design artists, on-campus relations, being able to surround them with great people, it really has helped us immensely over the last two years."
An 'intuitive' understanding of the vision
One can read between the lines of Sosna's earlier comments and conclude this likely wasn't a straight spending spree for personnel, though surely it required more resources than had previously been committed.However the finances shake out -- USC doesn't have to disclose such details as a private university -- ultimately what this makeover required more than anything was a full buy-in to the plan and vision.
The day after USC's humbling loss to Iowa in the 2019 Holiday Bowl, capping a mediocre 8-5 season, weeks after the entirety of that small 2020 recruiting class was locked in during the early signing period, Sosna met with Wood to start taking stock of the program and what it needed.
That soon led to a meeting with Harris about the specific needs in the recruiting department.
Sosna says he had no preconceived notions upon arriving from Cincinnati shortly after Bohn was hired. He knew what the results were, he didn't yet know all the factors or the personnel at play, and he wanted to go in open-minded about all of it.
And he quickly came to appreciate Harris' potential in the same way Helton had some eight months earlier in making the hire.
"I think very quickly on in meetings with Clay and Joseph Wood and Spencer Harris, it was very clear that there was consensus about the opportunities for improvement that were in front of us. And what I recognized very quickly is that Spencer is an extraordinary talent. There's a reason that he earned one of the top 5 recruiting jobs in all of college football at 26 years old," Sosna says.
"In the director of player personnel role, you want someone who is elite at talent evaluation, organizing the recruiting process, developing your overall recruiting strategy, leveraging modern technologies and recruiting practices while also commanding the respect of and earning trust from the coaching staff. Ideally your director of player personnel will be able to do one or a few of those things at an extremely high level. The thing about Spencer is he does them all. ... So we have a high degree of confidence in the direction of our recruiting program because we have such incredible trust and belief in Spencer."
Just as notable was the implicit understanding of what Harris wanted to build and how the proposed new positions they discussed were essential to advancing the department.
Between his stints in the athletic department at Cincinnati, Sosna spent two years with the Cleveland Browns, including a promotion in 2018 to the role of salary cap and contract analyst.
Needless to say, he understood the concept of a pro-model personnel department.
"He articulated well through the structure and the organization, but you have to remember I'm very familiar with the pro model having been in those rooms for two seasons with the Browns and experienced that process under the direction of probably one of the most brilliant talent evaluators in football over the last decade in John Dorsey. So I think I was predisposed, not to having an idea about what we should do per se, but certainly intuitively understood what it is that they are trying to accomplish," Sosna says.
"I know that there's a lot made of the size of recruiting and support staffs relative to our national peers and our conference peers, but we were laser focused on constructing the right format for USC."
This may have been a dream career path for Harris, as he had put it, and probably a dream opportunity he walked into at USC, but there were probably better adjectives to describe that first year and the culmination of the 2020 recruiting cycle.
In finishing in that tie for 71st in the 2020 Rivals recruiting rankings with Louisiana Tech, USC -- one of the most historically successful college football programs in the country, situated in one of the most fertile recruiting territories nationally -- had finished behind the likes of Marshall, Bowling Green, Rutgers, Florida Atlantic, every other Pac-12 program and so on.
A lot of that had to do with the size of USC's class -- the Trojans ended up with those 12 signees in part due to limited available scholarships (a 13th never made it to campus) -- but just as much also had to do with missing on many top local prospects in a way that USC was unaccustomed.
While Harris had walked in midway through the cycle and was working against some preexisting factors, the results stung nonetheless. But there was no time to dwell -- and no need to as he could see the necessary resources suddenly falling into place.
"There was a lot of things that went into what the final result of that class was -- really that prior season, all the change that occurred afterwards. That culminated to a rough 2020 finish for our recruiting class. It was in my first kind of six months here, but really recruiting classes, the foundation is set almost a year and a half, two years before. But when those types of events occur and you have such a pivotal role in it, to me, you can go two ways -- you can blame other people or it can light a fire under you," Harris says.
"And that's how I took it and I think the rest of our department and our head coach took it was, what are we going to do to fix this so this never happens again? ... I think we looked inward and obviously having the support from this new administration and investing in making some changes played a massive, massive role in the 2020-21 difference in recruiting."
'It validated so much of the work we put in'
All of the infrastructure and organization is only as good as a program's ability to also close the deal with top recruits, of course.So as that restructuring process was unfolding behind the scenes over the last year, the Trojans were just as importantly swaying the very public perception problem that lingered through that 2020 recruiting cycle.
The hiring of Williams as cornerbacks coach, prying him away from Oregon where he had already established himself as one of the top recruiters in the country, was the first sign of a new aggressive approach for USC.
Not only were the Trojans going to target the top high school recruits across the country -- they were going to target the top recruiters.
Williams would deliver on all of the hype and expectations that accompanied his hiring in February, 2020, playing a lead role in USC signing 5-star defensive end Korey Foreman (once committed to Clemson), 4-star Rivals100 linebacker Raesjon Davis (once committed to LSU), fellow 4-star linebacker Julien Simon, 4-star Rivals100 WR Kyron Ware-Hudson (who flipped from a long-standing commitment to Oregon), 4-star cornerbacks Ceyair Wright and Prophet Brown, 4-star nickel Jaylin Smith, and teaming with safeties coach Craig Naivar to land 4-star standouts Calen Bullock, Xamarion Gordon and Anthony Beavers. (Naivar also proved to be a dynamic addition to the recruiting efforts this last year, and defensive line coach Vic So'oto was significant in Foreman's recruitment while putting in time building a relationship from scratch there as his future position coach).
Williams' ability to reel in Brown, the No. 8-ranked CB in the class and the No. 118 national prospect overall, last July was one of the early recruiting wins in particular that stood out and signaled that the Trojans were again heading in the right direction.
"We were not in first place for Prophet Brown. We thought he was headed to Oklahoma, they had done a great job recruiting him," Harris recalls. "And Donte turned that around really quickly. He builds a relationship with him and before we could even blink really Prophet was committing to us."
Williams is his own story, but this one certainly can't be told without him.
Now with his recent promotion to associate head coach he is going to be even more involved in recruiting some of the Trojans' top offensive targets in this 2022 class and beyond.
"Donte obviously has a lot of strengths, is a very unique person, especially when it comes to recruiting. Not only is he a very natural relationship-builder, really good football coach, but his work ethic is through the roof," Harris says. "I've spoken on how competitive I am and how badly I want to win, and Donte is the exact same way. Him and I are on the phone all the time and it's really just about how we can win, and what do we need to do to win."
Harris was asked if, looking back, there was one definitive turning point in the 2021 recruiting cycle where he knew things were going to be different. He says he can't pinpoint one because every commitment win felt like a major step to the Trojans re-establishing the program to its more familiar stature.
Really, it started with the productive junior day event on campus right as the 2020 cycle was winding down -- with USC's focus already on what it had to do to rebound in 2021 -- followed by the buzz created by the new hires on the defensive side. The commitment of local 4-star offensive tackle Mason Murphy last March was the beginning of a wave of momentum that would carry through the summer with USC spending a good amount of time inside the top 5 of the recruiting rankings.
Even still, the question remained publicly -- could USC again land the truly elite 5-star talent that had been the foundation of the program for so many years?
That answer came late one night in mid-December when Foreman, the No. 3-ranked national prospect from just up the road in Corona, let Morris know he was staying home and picking the Trojans over the likes of Clemson, LSU and Georgia. It had to be kept secret, though, because he was scheduled to reveal his decision live on national TV on Jan. 2 as part of the All-American Bowl spotlight show.
As the story goes, only Morris, Harris, Helton and a compliance staffer would know in the meantime. (Foreman especially wanted to surprise Williams, his lead recruiter).
"Gavin Morris called me at midnight on the Thursday of the three-day signing period pretty much crying saying that Korey is ready to sign with us," Harris recalls. "And then that process of keeping it quiet and keeping it between three or four people, but knowing that we signed Korey Foreman, what we feel is the No. 1 player in the country, keeping him home, knowing that he's going to wear 0 and knowing that we have two weeks to make a bad-ass video for him and build up this Jan. 2 announcement and hoping on that Jan. 2 announcement we were going to get Ceyair Wright too, and knowing that getting those two meant we'd probably have a great chance of getting Raesjon Davis for National Signing Day in February ... that moment just triggered a lot, and it validated so much of the work that we put in, so much of that time, investment, change.
"From that 2020 early signing day to 13 months later to sign Korey Foreman and to put together a top 10 recruiting class was just monumental for this program and where we're going and what we still have left to achieve. But it signals a major step forward for us."
'The job is never finished'
The very next day after Foreman and Wright announced their commitments on national TV, after USC made headlines on ESPN and other national sites for winning one of college football's most high-profile recruiting battles, inside the program the focus had already shifted toward the next potential big target.Again, the Trojans weren't just hunting for top recruits -- but more top recruiters as well.
Texas had just fired head coach Tom Herman and there was thought that USC might be able to make a run at Bryan Carrington, who was Herman's director of recruiting and had made a name for himself nationally.
Harris and Sosna started exchanging text messages that next day, Jan. 3, talking about it.
They weren't sure yet what role they would pursue him for or how exactly it would all work, nor did it matter. It was an opportunity to add another dynamic recruiter to the staff -- the details could be figured out later and they were willing to get creative.
"It was like, 'OK, what's next?'" Sosna recalls.
One prospect from Texas' 2020 recruiting class described Carrington as a pivotal figure for many of the signees that year, and in a fitting bit of irony he was integral in recruiting 2019 5-star WR Bru McCoy, who signed with USC, transferred to Texas for spring ball and then transferred back to USC. With the Trojans already making a major emphasis on recruiting Texas, Carrington's ties there were valuable, but he had also shown he was not geographically limited in his reach.
The pursuit was on, and by the end of the month, USC was hosting Carrington on a visit, making a recruiting pitch to the recruiter.
And an effective one at that.
Later the following week, it was a done deal -- Carrington, who had ambitions to segue more into the coaching side, would leave Texas for a quality control analyst job at USC, where he'll assist running backs coach Mike Jinks and also have his hand in the Trojans' recruiting efforts.
"I joke with Spencer too that if we didn't end up getting Carrington I was going to be extremely devastated because it was by far the best recruiting pitch I've ever given," Sosna says. "... I joked with Bryan that I've never seen a head coach, associate head coach, defensive coordinator, safeties coach, director of player personnel, director of player development and whoever else all involved in recruiting a potential quality control analyst into the program.
"But I thought there was a healthy dose of irony that here we are putting on essentially a recruiting visit for somebody who has mastered the art of recruiting, himself. So I think the fact that we had success tells you something about our ability to do that."
Inside the building, it felt like further affirmation that the narrative around the program had indeed changed quite a bit in a short amount of time if both highly-coveted 5-star prospects and nationally-regarded staffers alike believed enough in the direction of USC football to commit their immediate futures to it.
The Trojans weren't done, though.
Right around the time the Carrington news was breaking on social media, Morris responded to a tweet from Jeff Martin, LSU's assistant director of on-campus recruiting operations, with a prophetic message -- "We coming for you next."
That was on Feb. 4, and a few weeks later Martin was indeed leaving his alma mater to join the Trojans as the director of scouting and player relations.
"I think it was a very similar set of circumstances, connecting with somebody who has aspirations for himself and his career and a credit to Clay that he was able to really quickly form a strong connection with Jeff and collaborate on a vision that will be able to allow Jeff to get to places that he wants to go," Sosna says. "I think we very quickly formed that strong relationship with him, and he already had so many existing relationships within the program that we were able to rather swiftly get to a point that we were able to make this work."
Martin had the connection with Morris and also had worked with USC assistant director of football video production Will Stout, whom USC had poached from LSU last spring as part of assembling its new football-specific video team.
"Jeff Martin had a prior relationship with Gavin, and I had the opportunity to go through the interview process with Jeff and I came away blown away," Harris says. "He is an extremely impressive individual with very lofty goals and had his hand in a lot of aspects of the LSU football program. I knew that if we brought him to 'SC and brought him to Los Angeles in a personnel role, that he would make a really positive impact on our program, not only from a personnel side, player evaluation side, which he will have a major part in, but just his way of thinking and the type of impact he wants to make on recruits and student-athletes' lives from a development standpoint will be really beneficial to us. And then obviously he's got some ties to an area of the country that we would like to grow our footprint."
Meanwhile, the Trojans had also plucked Marshall Cherrington away from Cal to be their director of recruiting strategy. A USC alum making a name for himself elsewhere in the conference, he had long been on Harris' radar and suddenly the Trojans were again a very enticing career move for a young up-and-comer in the business.
The overall plan has evolved even since that initial planning meeting between Sosna and Harris coming off the end of the 2019 season, and surely from what Harris pitched to Helton in his interview, but the guiding philosophy has not.
"Since we added the positions to bolster our recruiting department, we haven't created any new ones. Every hire we've made this offseason has been a 1-to-1 replacement for a position that has been vacated. However, we believe in selecting for talent, so when presented with an opportunity to acquire talent like Bryan Carrington or Marshall Cherrington or Jeff Martin, we're not trying to fit somebody into a very specific role when they can do something different," Sosna says. "We want to align the strengths of our personnel with what they do everyday and how they can best make an impact on our program. So it's not the type of situation where you have to fit specifically in the role that you're replacing and take on the exact responsibilities that a departed staff member may have been executing. At the end of the day we want to get the best people in the building."
So how does it all add up? With the final vacancies in that recruiting department being formally filled this month, here's how it all falls into place.
| Name | Title | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Spencer Harris | Director of Player Personnel | Oversees the whole department, "general manager" of the operation |
| Gavin Morris | Assistant AD/Director of Player Development | Reports directly to Clay Helton, key relationship-builder/recruiter while also playing a mentor role to players already on the roster |
| Drew Fox | Assistant Director of Player Personnel | Leads scouting of offensive prospects, working closely with the offensive staff to identify targets |
| Jeff Martin | Director of Scouting & Player Relations | Leads scouting of defensive prospects, working closely with the defensive staff to identify targets |
| Armond Hawkins Jr. | Director of High School Relations | Consistent point of contact between USC and high schools, coaches, prospects and their families |
| Marshall Cherrington | Director of Recruiting Strategy | A Swiss Army Knife, working hand-in-hand with the creative team and the assistant coaches on anything from a recruiting strategy standpoint -- game-planning individualized recruitments for prospects. |
| Megan Mueller | Director of Recruiting Operations | Coordinating on-campus recruiting events, logistics, manage student workers, serve as a point of contact for parents and counselors, helping incoming players with NCAAA eligibility and admissions checklists |
| Alex Verdugo | Director of Graphic Design | Creating graphics used to promote the program and aid recruiting on social media |
| Derek Marckel | Director of Football Creative Media | Also involved in the graphics arm of the operation |
| Nick Mitchell | Director of Video Production | Coordinating USC football-specific video projects to promote the program and its reach |
| Will Stout | Assistant Director Football Video Production | Producing video packages to promote the program, involved in USC's BLVD Studios venture |
So, then, does this current construction meet the full vision Harris had for the personnel department he aimed to build here?
"I would say it's pretty damn close," he says. "What we've built over just the last 12 months here going from five full-time to now it's 11 in our recruiting personnel department, the administration has been extremely supportive of what we are trying to accomplish. From my position, it's been a challenge -- we created some of these positions over a year ago, and trying to hire through COVID was really tough and trying to get people to move to Los Angeles, we [didn't] know if the season is happening -- so then to make some hires and get through the season and be able to hit the restart button and finish out this staff, I'm extremely excited about where it's going and what our potential is. I think that's the most exciting part -- it's not that we made these hires, it's what we are trying to accomplish.
"It's just everybody, they have very descriptive and specific responsibilities and we can become experts in our field. Drew Fox can become an expert in just personnel. Gavin Morris can become an expert in the relationship-building aspect. Megan Mueller is going to be our director of recruiting operations, she can focus on just her responsibility. So we can just operate so much more efficiently in all aspects of the recruiting process, which as I talked about earlier there's just so much going on, the more people you have involved, who are great people and are going to work their tails off and are all-in but no ego, humble and hungry, we can help this program, our head coach, our assistant coaches achieve our goals at the highest level."
The final question went to Sosna -- does USC's recruiting department makeover feel finished at this point?
"The job is never finished," he says matter-of-factly.
