Post Season Tidbits #2 Coach Carty Interview

[Big R]

On signing day, December 20th, the media had our last Zoom interview of the year with Coach Carty. The moderator was Brendan Thomas and participants included KT, Andy Walter, UDan, UDHoops, and myself.

It was a really good Q&A session and, although I have a transcription of the entire session, I am only going to quote the questions I, personally, had for RC, and his answers. This is in case the others have, or will, provide a write-up of their own Q’s.

My questions were sprinkled throughout the interview, sometimes as a follow-up to questions from others. So, if the following seems a bit disjointed, that is why.

GH: Hey coach, between now and the next signing day are you going to be recruiting both high school athletes and portal-eligible guys?

RC: Yeah, for sure.

GH: And do you have a number of how you want it to go that way, or just however it rolls out?

RC: Yeah, we're just going to look for the best football players that can fit what we need, talent wise, character wise, and positionally what we need. So, at this point it's tough to say that you want ‘this many high school guys’, and ‘this many transfers’ - you almost can't say that anymore in football. It's hard to know who's going to be on your team by the time those guys are all signed up. I do know that, at this point, the high school guys that are still around – again, it's almost like the portal now at this point. They're all in different situations. Some of them were planning on signing with somebody this first signing period, but it didn't work out, or there are guys that maybe were overlooked, or had a great senior year and didn't have that caliber of recruitment early. You know, you can sometimes find a real hidden gem at this point as well, or somebody that maybe was hoping to go a little “bigger” and it ended up he may now get the chance to be lucky enough to come to us. So, I think it's different in the high school realm, and then, in the transfer realm, there's still quite a few guys out there that are all in different situations also - whether they have anywhere from one to four years left. Can they come in the mid-year? Can they not? It's different than it used to be.

GH: And then, if I understand it correctly, the 45-day period for an individual player to enter the portal at the end of the season depends on - Were they in a bowl game? Did their coach get fired? - All those sorts of things come into play, right?

RC: Yes, there are some caveats to the portal windows. If you're a graduate student or expecting to graduate, you can always go in, and so that's a little different. If you are not on scholarship, you can always go in. If your coach gets fired, I'm pretty sure you can go in, and there's other reasons now. Regarding bowl games - I don't think it’s bowl games, I think it’s the championship season, so I think that's really more FCS guys - like let's say South Dakota State or Montana I think still have a week after or something, but I don't know that for sure.

GH: And then, will we learn about transfers as as they get signed up? Or does it depend on, kind of like a preferred walk on, when they actually enter school? How and when will we know about the transfers is the question.

RC: So, yeah, either when they come to school or if they were assigned a grant-in-need and we release that – not too different than a walk-on. There's just not a signing day, which I would actually love if there was one so, (tongue firmly planted in cheek), if you have any connections with the NCAA, if we could have a couple transfer signing times that would lock them in and lock us in, and if we can get a transfer national letter-of-intent, that would be tremendous.

GH: And then, one last question - you kind of intimated, with Streeter, that we were fighting off some other schools towards the end. Is that the case based on the season that he had?

RC: Yeah, it was the case with pretty much every one of these student athletes, although, you know, signing day is a little bit more anticlimactic than it used to be. You knew you were in some fights usually, and I’m not saying it’s not the case with anybody anymore, but the recruiting process is so sped up nowadays that we've known about these kids, and they've been committed to us for a long time. So that doesn't mean we're not still recruiting them to the end, but it's just different. It's not like we had a bunch of players we were battling for that we had up on a visit last weekend like it used to be. Sometimes, especially at the FCS level, we were unsure of who was going to sign until a couple of days before that “dead period” struck. But that was the the big thing with these guys. We've had a lot of these guys committed for a long time. That's not easy when you're when your guys are having a great senior season and we're talking about All-State players, state champions, track champions - guys that have legitimate statistics, guys that are raising in ‘star levels’ on 247, for whatever that means. So, it's not easy when when they're noticeable and in this day and age and everybody's a little more fluid in recruiting, it's pretty impressive that our staff was able to build relationships so well with these young men, and our university was so enticing to them, that we had a chance to keep them.

RC: Are there any more questions? Rich, I can't believe it, man, only a couple of questions from you - this is your day man!

GH: I know, I know. It's just like you said with the portal – things are so fluid, it's so hard to say anymore ‘what question do I ask?’

RC: I know! I'm with you. The answers are tough too, I'll tell you that much. It's not like there's a road map, or like this is the timeline that it always happens in you know - ‘we have this many at this time, and this many at this time’ - it's just trying to find really good players and get them in our program.

GH: I would ask this: are there any certain positions that you really feel like you need to continue to beef up now with transfers?

RC: Yeah, good question. I do think we certainly need a couple more receivers to come help. You know, we lost essentially four of our top five guys to to graduation. That was just because of the way that we recruited them. A couple were already on the team and then a couple we had to bolster, and that depth was great, but they were all pretty old. So that's a position that we're still obviously on the hunt for. I think, on the defensive side, in the defensive backfield in certain places I think we could still add a hat. But as you know, Rich, I think you've been around us long enough you know there are good players out there that we think fit us culturally and talent-wise, we're probably just going to try to find a way to to put them on our roster and hope that that's one of the positions that we have depth in. I think you saw it at receiver this year - we had too many guys go down, and we were still “OK”. You know we were still pretty darn good at the end of the season. We still had a couple of guys that can make plays. Could we have been better at full strength? Sure, but that's kind of the point, right? And how do you build that out so that you can do your best to not just worry about your best one or best two and hopefully you’ve got a bunch of people. Because it only helps in competition, too, you know? I mean the more guys you get on the roster and get in the room that can play, that deserve playing time, the better that room is going to go. It's going to rise all the ships. So, hopefully, that continues to be our architecture. It's just getting good football players, putting them in the program and getting the best 85 countable players on scholarship that we can, and then add a ton of walk-ons that can go out there and help us as well and fight for playing time, and fight for scholarship money.

GH: I know Kym Wimberly came in as a grad student and then he got hurt, unfortunately, early on - is he done now?

RC: Yeah, he is. He probably had the ability to get a medical red shirt if he applied for one, if he went through the application process, but he's hanging ‘em up. You know he's had three season-ending injuries, this is the third in his career, and you know he is the best, man. I feel bad for him that it didn't work out as much as he wanted it to, because he's such a great kid and a great player. But, you know, at some point you got to go use your Harvard degree you know? So now he's got a Harvard degree and a Masters from Delaware, so he'll do OK at whatever he decides to do. He's also an awesome, awesome human being and so he's hung ‘em up, unfortunately.

[Brookside kid hen]

Great report Big R, very informative. I think that RC is as confused as the rest of it when it comes to the new rules landscape with the transfer portal and exactly who and what positions to try to bring in. But he got some good players to Newark last year and I have utmost confidence that he will do so again this year. Thanks Big R for all you do to keep us long distance blue hen fans informed on what's going on with our football team.

[Big R]

It is a puzzle even for teams not going through the FCS-to-FBS transition. But when you have to manage the shift from 63 “equivalencies” to 85 headcount or “counters”, that makes it doubly tough for RC in this current environment. But he does know what positions have the biggest need for immediate help. He mentioned WR and DB, and in the last several days we’ve seen one WR and two DB transfers.

[Cluck U]

Nice job, Big R! Thanks.

Regarding Carty…as an old lady once asked, “Where’s the beef?”

Happy we got some help in the trenches…but we need more.

[Bluewyn Gold]

Thanks for that post. Very informative & entertaining read.

Reading Carty’s words reminds me of how little I understand about all of the recruiting rule changes. Such a complicated world coaches are operating in these days.

The idea that rung the truest was that RC is just trying to get the best players into the program. That’s a distilled and simple idea, but easier said than done.

[Hengrad07]

With 85 full scholarships, some players could lose their partial scholarship.

Thanks gotta be a tough conversation.

As for transfers, I can't believe RC will get as many one year guys, as nothing to play for in ‘24.

[mpwerrell]

With 85 full scholarships, some players could lose their partial scholarship.

Thanks gotta be a tough conversation.

As for transfers, I can't believe RC will get as many one year guys, as nothing to play for in ‘24.

You are no doubt correct but someone posted that we probably would not get transfers with two years of eligibility and we now have three of those players. The reasons for transferring are multiple.

[Baltimore Hen]

With 85 full scholarships, some players could lose their partial scholarship.

Thanks gotta be a tough conversation.

As for transfers, I can't believe RC will get as many one year guys, as nothing to play for in ‘24.

Maybe Carty is out in Boulder during the dead period taking Coach Prime's seminar in the "it's not a good fit" conversation as it relates to college football ....

[jd of de]

With 85 full scholarships, some players could lose their partial scholarship.

Thanks gotta be a tough conversation.

As for transfers, I can't believe RC will get as many one year guys, as nothing to play for in ‘24.

Under NCAA rules, you are not allowed more than 85 FCS equivalency scholarships. Hence, full or partial, we’ve never been allowed more than 85 players receiving athletic scholarships.