Dream Team

Advertising is all about grabbing your audience’s attention and appealing to them in order to get them to buy or become interested in your product. As the landscape of recruiting continues to develop, coaches have to find different ways of appealing to players. Conference prestige, campus life, academic rigors, and even football facilities are just a few of the devices coaches use in order to convince young athletes to choose their school over all others. Programs have also started implementing a new concept: recruiting themes, which actually is a very well thought out way of advertising. The University of Georgia and Coach Mark Richt have created a concept called “The Dream Team.” Coach Richt is trying to convince the best players in the state of Georgia to buy into the Dream Team concept because it allows the best players to keep their talents in-state and represent the state as a whole at the University of Georgia. Their recruiting concept recently has started to build a lot of steam.

With multiple Division I schools within a state, keeping talented athletes in-state and recruiting them to one specific university is very important and a difficult task to achieve. The University of Georgia has a strong trend of recruiting the majority of the top tier talent within the state of Georgia. In my opinion, there is a direct correlation between the number of talented in-state athletes a school can recruit and how successful the school will be in season. This is especially true in the talent-laden southeast where all of the states have huge talent pools. This is true in Florida as well. For the longest time Miami dominated the state's recruiting, until then the transfer of power went to Florida State when they were able to recruit more in-state athletes than Miami, and now Florida is on top. If a program can get higher in-state recruiting numbers, they will have to recruit fewer out of state athletes, which is usually a much more difficult task.

UGA’s Dream Team concept really is amazing because it allows athletes who have played for their state against other southeastern states, especially rivalries such as Georgia vs. Florida and South Carolina vs. North Carolina, to band together at a college level and continue to display pride in their state. The idea of playing for a team which has enough in-state talent to beat their rival state is a huge draw for a young athlete who is proud of their background. This concept has gained popularity with the top talent in Georgia and could allow the University of Georgia to bring in one of the best recruiting classes of its recent history. I have a feeling that other universities will adopt similar concepts to try to attract in-state athletes. Regardless of the actual recruiting themes they come up with, it is clear that every university’s goal is to obtain as much in-state talent as possible year to year. In-state recruiting allows a school to create pipelines and win rivalry games. This is just another significant concept in winning football games and building a solid program....