Here, every time I went into a home, a rival recruiter had just been there or was just coming into a home as I was leaving. That was an eye-opener for me. – Ed Lamb
Recruiting universes can be light years apart.
BYU assistant coach Ed Lamb led Southern Utah to the Big Sky title this past year but in Cedar City, letter of intent “signing day” was so low key that he and his staff would often take off and golf in St. George.
But on Wednesday, Lamb felt the full throttle public relations and marketing parade of his alma mater. It included live television press conferences, a meeting under the stadium packed with Cougar Club members and a live Internet social media barrage of announcements from 5 to 11 a.m. that reached 17.6 million on Twitter. BYU signing tweets became the No. 1 trending topic on that social media platform in Utah and actually crashed BYU’s athletic department server, ranked as among the top 15 traffic sites in college football for five minutes.
Lamb witnessed a parade of former BYU stars including All-American tight end Chris Smith, Outland Trophy winner Jason Buck and All-Pro NFL tight end Chad Lewis introduce recruits as they signed, all decked out in royal blue polo shirts with the sailor logo. When they left the football office, they were each packing a gift box filled with swag.
In short, Lamb had witnessed a national spectacle.
“At SUU it was my practice to go golfing on signing day and we’d gather up the letters and send out an email in the afternoon. There wasn’t a lot of media pressure or any stress about guys we didn’t get, the dynamic at SUU is if they didn’t really want to be there, they didn’t belong there and wouldn’t be successful.”
BYU signing day was, one could say, like hamsters on a cage wheel.
“Here it’s different. It’s more competitive. Here, every time I went into a home, a rival recruiter had just been there or was just coming into a home as I was leaving. That was an eye-opener for me,” said Lamb.
“But the nuts and bolts of recruiting, talking to players, evaluating talent, doing background checks with high schools and making visits, was exactly the same thing. On one hand there were some things I had to get used to and on the other hand, it was business as usual.”
In some regards, all the fanfare aside, Lamb may just be the kind of recruiter BYU needs on Kalani Sitake’s staff. He is not a member of the LDS faith and he can come at recruits from a unique perspective having played for the Cougars. But more importantly, while at SUU, he had been forced to go beyond the Scout.com and Rivals.com recruiting evaluators and star givers to find football players others had overlooked.
Lamb has a track record of finding talent and putting them in the NFL. He’s had seven SUU players go on to the NFL and he had three SUU seniors projected as possible NFL draft picks this spring including cornerback LeShaun Sims.
This is why a Lamb recruit signed by BYU Wednesday, safety Chris Wilcox out of Fontana, California’s Eleanor Roosevelt High School, really piques interest. Wilcox was not on BYU's radar before Sitake hired Lamb, who had evaluated the 6-2, 175-pound prospect and liked what he saw.
“We felt he was an NFL type prospect. On a checklist we use to evaluate, he scored high and he was a fit so we went after him hard,” said Lamb.
Sitake made it very clear to reporters the best thing he’s seen out of BYU’s new staff the past six weeks was the effort, personality, enthusiasm and passion of his assistant coaches in going after recruits. He declared BYU recruiting would be a 365-day-a-year job and his staff would never rest as Wednesday passed and he now focused on preparing for spring drills.
“"We will search out the whole world. Calling out LDS faithful: If you see a big dude who can move, call us," Sitake declared.
And so concluded the first February day of madness for the new BYU football regime in the post-Bronco Mendenhall era.
It was a party atmosphere with plenty of laughs, former players and even LaVell Edwards, who was on hand. Everyone ate cake, found camera time and shook a lot of hands. It was the culmination of a month of craziness for the staff.
At one point in the press conference, Sitake had to interrupt Ty Detmer and tell him not to discuss walk-on quarterbacks, that it was a no-no. A few minutes later, Detmer’s new running back coach Reno Mahe somehow cornered a media microphone, identified himself as a reporter from the Coconut Wireless and asked, “Coach Detmer, could you talk about the walk-on quarterbacks?”
“No comment,” said Detmer that drew laughter in the studio.
By 2 p.m., about the time Lamb headed for the door at the BYU Broadcast Building after meeting with media, his school's football recruiting exposure trended No. 1 in Utah in Twitter with a reach of 26.4 million, had 500,000 Facebook posts and 610,000 loops on Vine.
Did Lamb and the rest of these guys have fun?
“It has been something else,” Lamb said.
EMAIL: dharmon@deseretnews.com.
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