National Signing Day Press Conference - Syracuse University Athletics

Scott Shafer Press Conference
National Signing Day
Feb. 4, 2015
Opening Statement
“It’s been a long, hard recruiting process throughout the course of this winter and it’s good to be back working with our players here. Starting off with today’s signing day, it’s a very good day for Syracuse football. I’m very pleased with the class that we put in that will be sitting in this room in a few months.

“Really, our focus going into the recruiting season was filling the needs with our roster, and it really starts up front with our offensive and defensive linemen, in which we took seven defensive linemen and five offensive linemen. Really all those kids played both ways up front.
“One major objective we had was when all things were equal in the recruiting process is if we had two players that we felt were equals on the football field then we wanted to make sure we were bringing in those with intelligence. We really scrutinized the transcripts and the test scores, and wanted to find a group of kids who were going to represent this first-class program in the academic side of things. As of today, I had Eric White go through and look at the transcripts, of our 25 kids, 23 today and two that are already on campus, they were just over a 3.0 in their transcripts, which I thought was really good. As always, we want to seek kids of character and I think our assistant coaches did a wonderful job with that.
“Really the last thing that we wanted to push on was having success in the northeast. Always the New York, New England and New Jersey. We wanted to make end roads in New Jersey and we did that. We have five kids from New Jersey, one was playing at a prep school but his residence is in New Jersey and I felt really good about that.
“With all that being said, I just want to take a quick second to thank our coaches and their families for the sacrifices they made so that we can go out and put together an extremely strong football class.”

On Marquise Blair
I really like Marquise. He’s long, he’s got great athleticism and has a Durell Eskridge body type, maybe a little bit taller than Durell coming in, but he will strike you. He hits like safeties we need around here. He’s tall, he’s long and he hits like Shamarko did, honestly. That and the fact that he’s just kind of a country kid. He’s from Wooster, Ohio, that area up there is kind of spread out from the rest of the football belt. It’s kind of off the beaten path. We found out about him when Doug Hoss brought him out here and I fell in love with him. I was expecting to see a 5-foot-11 kid because of the way he moved, and then when he walked through the door I was really pleased.
“We were standing there and we had a camp day going on. He was not attending the camp, but he was just standing there watching and they were running 40-yard dashes across coming at 5.1, 4.9, 5.2. I said to him ‘you ever get timed in the 40?’ and he said ‘yeah’ and then didn’t say anything after.
“Now if you ran a 4.4 something 40, wouldn’t you be excited to tell a college coach about that? I asked him what he ran and he said ‘a 4.47, but my coach told me I had the wrong shoes on.’ He had high top basketball shoes on.
“Now, I’m excited about this kid, he’s got a wonderful family, wonderful mother and I’m just excited to have him in the program. He’s a wonderful football player. I love recruiting secondary players, and he’s a guy I just fell in love the instance I watched him. Once again, offense, defense and kicking game. He’s a three-for and he’s just a great player.”
On Donte Strickland
“Donte has all the skill sets. He’s on the field almost every play of every game, it’s amazing. If you watch his offensive clips, obviously you’re excited because he can take it the distance any time. He can catch the ball out of the backfield and is also an excellent return man.
“On defense, he was very good too. Another kid that I consider to be a striker. He brings the whole package to it wherever you want to go and I just don’t think you go wrong and the fact that he’s from New Jersey makes it even better.
On Jordan Fredericks and his ‘beastmode twitter handle’
“He’s got some beastmode in him I guess. He’s another kid, Gatorade Player of the Year in the state of New York. Great little football player, compact runner, he can get in and out of his breaks, great vision. Of all the three tailbacks, Tyrone Perkins as well, the thing I liked about all three of them is that they all had offense and defensive clips.
“Too bad for Tyrone he tore his ACL at the beginning of the season. We actually talked about deferring his enrollment to give him more time to continue to get healthy, but he’s way ahead of schedule and when the doctors compared notes they said he’s going to be ready.
“All three of those kids have great vision and they play all over the place on the field.”
On the ‘dirty recruiting’ that exists today
“I think it’s extremely disrespectful to the kids that are getting recruited when you start throwing dirt bombs at each other. We won’t do that.
“We’ll try to say above the bar with things. We had instances of that here at the end when people were throwing dirt at us, and I felt horrible for the kids. These kids are still just figuring out their way and when they make a decision, they’re committed and they feel good about it, it’s ok for a coach to call and say ‘are you sure.’ If the answer is yes then let it go like coach Harbaugh did. Jim goes to Michigan and is a very close friend of mine who I respect. He was jumping all over Jake Pickard to see if Jake would jump. Jake decided to take a visit and I’m sure he fell in love with Jim just like everyone else does, but when Jake came back home and decided he was going to stay with the ‘Cuse, Jim wrote him a very nice text and said best of luck with coach Shafer. That’s the way it should be done. The others I won’t mention, but it’s a shame, it really is.”
How do you maintain integrity and positivity in recruiting
“You focus on the positives and understand that in the world we live in today, people are always going to throw dirt and are more interested in the controversial story. We’re more focused on finding kids of high character at Syracuse and let’s handle our business the right way. Win, lose or draw you want to be able to walk out of this building with integrity and that’s why we try to recruit kids with integrity and get people involved that have their best interests in mind. I think it’s the job of the college coaches to do it, but it’s also on the high school coaches. When a kid makes his decision and says ‘coach, I want to go to Syracuse,’ the high school coach has to respect that and protect him. Sometimes you have that, in most instances we had that in this class, but there are times when people come in and out off the door. That’s the reality of recruiting right now and it’s a damn shame.”

On Syracuse’s recruiting philosophy
“Really, my philosophy is hire good coaches that are good evaluators of talent, watch the film without regard for who offered them, who put stars next to their names, and believe our own eyes. I’ve been in this business 24 years, we have to trust ourselves and one another and that’s always been the approach.
“I always used to joke with the guys when I was the defensive coordinator and say ‘let’s take a look at these 24 guys and I don’t want to know anything about them other than their height, weight and academics,’ and we don’t worry about the recruiting profile or who else is on them, we just turn on the tape and look at it that way. You mention Chandler and Arthur [Jones] we sometimes say let’s put the tape of Chandler on, or let’s put the tape of someone else who played the same position on and let’s believe our own eyes, really.
“It’s ironic, the kids that ended up picking up the most traffic in this class are the kids like Steven Clark. Steven is in the middle of Alabama, the middle of nowhere to be honest with you, a neat little town with really nice folks. When coach Daoust brought him to the table and we really liked him and there weren’t a lot of people on him. Then after we were on him, people started following his trail a little bit and at the end, Florida, Ole Miss and Vanderbilt came in to try and pluck him and that’s where I think the credit goes to the coaches, because we want to try to evaluate the talent level that meets our criteria early and then recruit them and build relationships with them and the most important people in their lives. I think there’s staying power with those who recruited them early and got to know who they are and they’re great examples.
“Pickard is another example. He committed to Wisconsin and I told him ‘hey Jake, go get ‘em and if anything changes, give me a shout’ and then when coach left and went to Oregon State, we got a phone call. Then he came back out and it was the third time he had been here and he knew everyone by name, so did his family and so did his brother and I think little Luke was excited that his brother might play closer to home and I think that staying power with relationships is what brought us to keeping those kids committed.”
On the defensive linemen in the class
“The defensive line in a lot of ways is the most difficult position to recruit. I think in a lot of ways, we have to have a list of 15 to get to the number that we wanted to. Steven Clark played both sides of the ball, got a chance to watch him play basketball and see how well he moved. He’s a bright kid and is physical, so we fell in love with him. Pickard, he is similar to Chandler [Jones]. Not to set that bar, but I love his motor. You watch his tape and there’s times I was joking with his dad that there are times when his technique is absolutely horrendous. You can teach technique with that talent and those long arms like he does, but you can’t teach that motor.
“Amir Ealey, he’s another one that I had a chance to watch play basketball, a multisport athlete. He can turn on a dime. Qaadir Sheppard, he’s another one who can play defensive end and if you watch the tape, you see their athleticism, catching the ball down the field. Tyler Cross is more of the old school, three technique guy that you watch and he’s a very talented kid and he moves very well on the turn. He can bend as coach Daoust likes to call it. He can bend in a step or a step and a half, which is hard to teach.
“So when I look at the defensive line position, I see high motors, high intelligence and a love for the game.”
On Bobby Acosta and his recruiting of New Jersey
“He’s done a great job. Bobby Acosta has been a great asset along with the coaches and the position coaches, he’s from there, he understands it and he can talk to the coaches and he’s done a great job there. Even though he’s from a smaller school there’s a high respect there and it was huge before we hired him. That was one of the things we got to do before we hired him is that I got to reach out to the high school coaches and say ‘what’s this guys like’ running through your schools and it was nothing but positive.
“He’s high energy and he loves the New Jersey kids and you back that up with our position coaches doing a great job. Just a great job by the staff, but a great job by Bobby in New Jersey.”

On long snappers:
“It’s kind of like the quarterback, we like to see all of our quarterbacks throw live, and we like to see our long snappers snap live. It’s 14 yards, 15 yards, it’s hard. You ever try it? Sam Rodgers, you never heard about him much because he always put the ball where it was supposed to be; I can only think of one that he kind of threw on the ground. They’re invaluable, that’s why the NFL pays a lot of money for them too, and you don’t hear about them do you? It’s a really important deal and losing Sammy was a tough deal, because he was just quietly going about his business and quietly going about his business off the field too, he’s a special guy. If you go through the whole list you’re not going to see a big list about all the great snaps that Matt Keller had; you know he was ’90 percent at the right thy board.’ You’re not going to see that stuff, it’s not statistics that you march in and brag about. I can tell you this, he’s an excellent student, he’s already enrolled here, and we actually had a conversation this morning at about 6:15am because we had a morning workout and I said, right now you’d be getting out of bed, you’d be heading over to homeroom. I said do you feel like you made the right decision? And he said yes coach. At the time he was doing up-downs, and chopping his knees. It’s a really important position, and it’s just about that quiet consistency. We’re excited to let him come in here and compete against the other kids.

On the addition of Jake Moreland to the staff late in the recruiting game:
“He really did not have a big role in the recruiting, including Kielan (Whitner), other than having some meals with him once we were allowed to let him have meals. Once he got signed, sealed, and delivered, Coach Moreland was in there. Down the road he’s been in different pockets, we’re actually going to sit down and rewrite where we’re going to put people and that sort of thing. He’s a strong recruiter, he’s been in Atlanta, he’s been in Alabama, been in Chicago, been in Wisconsin, so we have a lot of variety there. He’s got a wonderful wife and three beautiful daughters to add to our ability to lure more talent in here with kids running around.

On the importance of recruiting in South Florida:
“I think to some degree it is, I think where you have talented guys that have had success recruiting is probably a good place to start. Last few years we were talking about why we can’t get New Jersey guys. You have a talented coach like Bobby (Acosta), who knows the area and can scout it out well, and now we pluck five kids out of there. I think it’s as much the person as well as the place, it’s got to be a combination when you make your decisions. You don’t want to force an area; there’s different areas where people have had success, and you got to stay with what has worked, and that’s what we’ll do with our guys abilities and where they’ve had success in the past. I do like the south Florida kid, I’ve recruited down there myself for a long time. There’ll be some change agent there, but we’ll work through it and still have it as a place where we’ll recruit, that’s for sure.”