Evaluating Character in Recruiting: What Losing Reveals And Winning Hides

Oct 9

6 min read

Florida Gators football players on the field near the end zone during a college game at a packed stadium.

Florida lost to Missouri by twenty-eight points on the first Saturday in October, and Jadan Baugh had the worst afternoon of his career as a starter. He carried the ball twelve times and gained thirteen yards.

On Sunday he texted his head coach, unprompted. “Coach, I’m sorry. I won’t let that ever happen again. I didn’t play my best.” Jon Sumrall’s reaction said as much about the gesture as the message did, because he pointed out that Baugh is not someone who does much texting or calling, and that reaching out unsolicited on a Sunday after a loss was encouraging.

Then Baugh went to his offensive line and apologized in person. His center, Harrison Moore, described it afterward. “He came up and talked to us and was like, look, I’m sorry, I need to do better.” And Moore, by his own account, refused the apology and took it himself. “No, I need to do better. We didn’t give you the opportunity to play to the best of your ability.”

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Two players in the middle of a twenty-eight point loss, each one working to take the blame off the other. That is not a behavior a staff installs in a week, and it is not something a Sunday morning team meeting produces on demand. Whatever else is true about that exchange, neither of them learned it between the final whistle and the time the message was sent.

Which leads to the question: If it was already in them, what in their recruitment would have revealed it? How can you evaluate character in recruiting?

Character is not just one thing

Treating character as a single quality is where evaluation often goes wrong. Thomas Lickona and Matthew Davidson, in their 2005 report “Smart and Good High Schools”, separated it into two kinds, and the distinction is more useful to a coach than almost anything else written on the subject.

Performance character is oriented toward mastery. It covers work ethic, effort, coachability, perseverance and self-discipline, and it is what allows a person to pursue excellence at anything.

Moral character is what ethical conduct and good relationships require. It covers integrity, honesty, fairness, respect and being a good teammate, and it includes how a player treats people and whether he does the right thing when nobody is checking.

A player can be strong in one and weak in the other. Many are, and the two have almost nothing to do with each other.

Your process measures one of them

Every evaluation instrument a program typically uses measures performance character well. Film shows effort. Practice shows coachability. A hard workout shows perseverance. The strength staff can describe a player’s self-discipline in numbers and defend the assessment with evidence. A program can tell you, with real confidence and real support, how a young man or woman competes.

Almost nothing in that same process measures the other kind. Ask how a recruit treats the people who cannot do anything for him, how she behaves once the score is out of reach, or what they do when a teammate costs them something they wanted, and the answer comes back as an impression rather than as evidence. The program is guessing. Worse, it does not know it is guessing, because the guess arrives in the same meeting, in the same voice, with the same confidence as the measurements sitting next to it.

None of that is a failure of effort. Moral character is harder to measure than performance character. It reveals itself in situations a program cannot schedule, it shows up most clearly in moments nobody is recording, and it cannot be timed, tested or put on film. Performance character cooperates with evaluation, because the conditions that reveal it are the same conditions a program creates every day anyway. Moral character cooperates with nothing.

The roster clock has made it harder still. A coach evaluating a roster today has less time to do it than any generation before. The portal turns a roster over in a single offseason, recruiting timelines have compressed to a fraction of the contact coaches once had before a decision was required, and a player can arrive in January and be a captain by September. The quality that takes the longest to see accurately is the one there is now the least time to see.

There is also research behind why the guess is so unreliable. Sackett, Zedeck and Fogli found that how well a person performs when they know they are being evaluated over a short stretch is only weakly related to how they perform day to day. A camp, a showcase and an official visit all measure performance under observation. A season measures something else entirely, and much of the difference between the two is behavior sustained when nobody is watching, which is precisely the territory moral character occupies.

Winning hides the difference

A program can go an entire good season without learning anything about the second kind of character, and the reason is simple. When a team is five and oh, the two elements of character produce identical behavior. Everybody is bought in, everybody is pleasant to be around, and nobody has been handed a reason to be otherwise. The competitor and the good teammate look exactly alike from the outside, and a coach watching a winning locker room is not getting any new information about either one.

Losing separates them. Performance character shows up in the week after a bad loss as the players who come back harder, who are first into the building, who take the correction without flinching. Moral character shows up in how those same players treat each other while they are losing. Some of them take responsibility that is not entirely theirs. Some of them begin quietly building a case against a teammate, a position coach or a coordinator. Some of them keep doing the small unseen things in a season that has gone sideways.

A bad loss is the most honest evaluation a program gets all year.

What a coach can do about it

None of this is an argument for recruiting differently in some vague sense. It is an argument for measuring something you are currently guessing at, and there are concrete ways to start.

Write down what you are looking for. Name the four or five behaviors that define moral character inside your program, in language specific enough to observe, and tie each one directly to a value you have already stated. If your program says it stands for accountability, write down what accountability looks like in a player you have not signed yet. Behaviors connected to nothing become a second list competing with your first, and a list you cannot evaluate against is a list of adjectives, which is how programs end up guessing in the first place.

Change who you ask. Head coaches and position coaches are selling, and everyone in recruiting knows it. The people with nothing to gain see more and shade less: trainers, equipment managers, bus drivers, teachers, custodians, and the coach on the other sideline who watched him in a game his team lost by thirty.

Go looking for the loss. Ask for film of a game the player’s team lost badly, and watch what he does in the fourth quarter of a result already decided. Ask his high school coach to describe the worst week that player had and what he did during it. That is a different question from asking what kind of kid he is, and it produces a different quality of answer.

Watch the edges of a visit. How a recruit treats a student worker, whether he speaks to people who cannot affect his recruitment, and what he does in the ninety seconds when he thinks nobody is evaluating him are all worth more than the formal conversation in your office.

Keep measuring after they arrive. Evaluation of this kind is not a gate that closes on signing day. The information keeps arriving every week of every season, most of it in moments nobody thought to write down, and a program that never created a place to record it will keep relying on impressions it formed years earlier.

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