Texas Tech football: We must look at recruiting differently under Matt Wells

With Matt Wells leaning heavily into the transfer market, it is time Texas Tech football fans start to look differently at how we evaluate his ability to recruit talent.

Recruiting is the lifeblood of any college athletic program. And nowhere is recruiting more difficult than in college football where programs annually sign classes of 18-25 players, the vast majority of which come from an ever-shrinking pool of high school players.

Thus, much of how a coach is perceived by his constituency revolves around how well he can recruit the top prep players in the nation. And over the last two decades, the recruiting side of building a program has grown into a cottage industry that is followed year-round by fans, the media, and even players.

Unfortunately for Texas Tech football head coach Matt Wells, he’s yet to prove to the fans in Raiderland that he can land a class chalked full of big-time high school talent.

So far, the best of his two classes at Tech (the 2020 class) has ranked just 48th nationally and 7th in the Big 12. What’s more, his current class sits at No. 77 overall and No. 9 in the league.

But the irony is that Matt Wells is proving to be an excellent recruiter. It’s just that his success is not coming in the traditional manner that fans have come to live and die by…the high school talent pool.

Rather, Wells seems to have the golden touch when recruiting in the newest talent acquisition frontier, the transfer portal. And given his success there, it is time for Texas Tech football fans to begin to look at recruiting from a new perspective.

Sure, Wells will never stop trying to land elite high school players. For instance, he signed 4-star WR Loic Fouonji in the class of 2020 and has 4-star QB Behren Morton and 4-star WR Jerand Bradley committed for the class of 2021.

But the days of Tech landing a top-30 recruiting class may be a thing of the past, at least as long as Wells is in charge. That’s because he seems to prefer to supplement the roster with transfers that he expects to make an immediate impact.

Those additions do not count towards a recruiting class’ rankings despite the fact that they often have a larger influence on how the upcoming season will play out than the average true freshman will. But on the other hand, just like high school recruits, transfers occupy one of the 85 scholarships that programs are allowed to hand out each semester.

That means that the more transfers a program plans to take, the fewer high school prospects it will welcome. Thus, the official recruiting class will be smaller than the traditional 18-25 players and in the world of recruiting rankings, the more players a class has, the higher it ranks given that the total of all the players’ ranking scores, not the average score per signee, is what determines where the class will sit nationally.

But just think about how differently we would view the last two Texas Tech football signing classes were the transfers Wells has brought to town considered part of each class.

In 2019, Tech secured former Penn State defensive back Zech McPhearson, who was the team’s most reliable corner last fall. As a recruit, he was a 4-star signee and the No. 32 player in the nation at his position. That’s a massive addition to the 2019 class. And the best news is that he’s back for at least one more year.

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Also, think about the fact that last offseason, Wells and his staff added a transfer wide receiver in R.J. Turner from Louisiana-Monroe who would lead the team in receptions with 45 and finish second in yards with 654. Were Tech to have gotten that type of production from a true freshman, we would all have been overjoyed.

Additionally, RB Armand Shyne and inside receiver McLane Mannix were also significant pieces of the puzzle last year and contributed far more than the average true freshman does. Thus, if you add those four players to the 2019 recruiting haul, a much different picture emerges when thinking about what Wells was able to do over the course of his second recruiting cycle.

Now, in 2020, he seems to have jumped head-first into the transfer portal and it has yielded some magnificent results. Most notably is LB Colin Schooler, who is second in the NCAA in career tackles among active players with 312. The Arizona grad transfer also is the NCAA active career leader with 46 tackles for loss.

Then there is Tyree Wilson, a former 4-star high school DE who has joined the program from Texas A&M and who still has three years of eligibility remaining. Though he will need a waiver to play in 2020, his addition to the roster is a huge boost and should be considered one of 2020’s best recruiting wins. Making matters even sweeter is the fact that both Schooler and Wilson are walking on this year, as is Utah State transfer QB Henry Colombi, meaning that they do not count against the 85 scholarship limit.

But we aren’t finished. Tech has also added safety Eric Monroe from LSU and RB Chadarius Townsend from Alabama. Both were 4-star signees out of high school and both will play huge roles this year with Monroe assured to start week one and Townsend adding some much-needed juice to the backfield.

In fact, this year Tech has welcomed eight transfers to the program, with seven expected to be part of the two-deep rotation if Wilson is awarded a waiver by the NCAA. Players like LB Brandon Randle from Michigan State and OL Josh Berger from Wofford are in the mix for starting jobs as fall camp unfolds but neither of them or any of the other first-year Red Raiders from the transfer portal are going to help boost the 2020 recruiting class ranking and that makes no sense.

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This year, Tech could start as many as eight former transfers and not because the program is desperate for warm bodies but because Wells has identified quality players and has been able to bring them to the South Plains. Yet we don’t seem to give him as much credit for his ability to land these players as we do Chris Beard for doing the same for his program. That’s not fair to Wells and it is a sign that Texas Tech football fans need to start looking at the recruiting game in a new light because the head coach and his staff seem to be blazing a new trail.

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