Ron McBride still has vivid memories of looking out his hotel window at the turquoise waves and the beachgoers lounging about on the sand in Hawaii.
During those days he was Utah’s head coach, searching for the next recruit to add to the Utes in the mid-1990s. Oftentimes he’d bring a young Kyle Whittingham to the island after he joined McBride’s staff in 1994.
From McBride to Whittingham, the Utes have reaped the benefits of creating a recruiting footprint in Hawaii for three decades.
“We have a huge presence in Hawaii because of the success in the early days with the boys graduating and later having good jobs,” McBride told The Salt Lake Tribune. “When you look at it, we have guys in the police department over there. We have guys coaching in the high schools. We have lawyers over there that played for us.”
Since 2015, the Utes have signed 13 players from the Aloha State, the most of any program in the Power Four. And, like they once did in Hawaii years ago, the Utes are now dabbling in new regions following their move from the Pac-12 to the Big 12.
And the Utes aren’t the only former Pac-12 program shifting recruiting pipelines. Their four-corner comrades are shifting their recruiting efforts, too, due to conference realignment.
According to Whittingham and Utes general manager Robert Blechen, Utah is aiming to build a new footprint by shifting to the South, East and even parts of the Midwest. The Utes don’t plan to abandon their current footprint, Blechen said, which extends to all of the Pacific states including Hawaii.
Their new conference geography has just forced them to think differently.
“Probably the biggest change, I would say, is we have gone into the Midwest a little bit more,” Blechen told The Tribune earlier this year. “We typically didn’t recruit Oklahoma very heavily and we’ve seen some success there. … But yeah, the footprint will still be mostly the same. California kids are still interested. Texas may be a slight uptick in interest.”
Whittingham added last Tuesday: “It shifted a little bit east — south and east. We were in Texas already, but we’ve got a bigger presence in Texas, and we’ve put more manpower into the southern states in Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, so we’ve shifted a little bit in that direction. We still have a good, solid presence in California, but not as much as it was before.”
So far Utah’s efforts lag behind their former Pac-12 foes, except for Arizona.
The Utes have offered 77 recruits from the South in their 2025 recruiting class, but it hasn’t matched the pace of ASU or Colorado’s presence in the region. The Buffaloes, led by second-year head coach Deion “Coach Prime” Sanders, have targeted a whopping 216 recruits in the South. The Sun Devils have also offered 110 players in the same region.
The experiment has paid dividends in some areas, particularly in Texas. Utah has landed 18 commitments in its 2025 class, with three of its recruits — defensive backs Shelton “Manny” Fuller III, Jason Stokes Jr. and Nathan Tilmon — hailing from the Lone Star State.
In the Midwest, the Utes landed Drew Clemens, a tight end from Kansas City, Missouri.
Whether or not Utah’s efforts will lead to more commitments in the South and Midwest is yet to be seen.
But one thing is for certain: the Utes will learn if the juice is worth the squeeze.
‘I had to find out where Utah was’
Utah’s recruiting world is bigger than ever. Morgan Scalley traveled more than 800 miles to El Paso, Texas, to make his case to 3-star Del Valle High School safety and Utes commit Manny Fuller last December.
Fuller has become a two-way star in West Texas, playing in the secondary on defense and as a running back on offense. His father, Shelton “Jerome” Fuller Jr., theorizes Scalley and the Utes learned of his son when he won Texas High School Football Player of the Week in 2023, following a game where he rushed 13 times for 331 yards and five touchdowns.
Utah started following Manny on social media, which then led to texts, phone calls and a visit from the defensive coordinator before he landed an offer from the Utes in the spring.
“We met at the high school,” Jerome told The Tribune. “We talked for maybe 20 or 30 minutes at the school. Coach Scalley was breaking it down. He was giving us all the acronyms. He was just laying it all out.”
To Jerome’s surprise, other teams from the West took an interest, as well. Oregon State, Utah’s in-state rival BYU and Boise State all offered him. It showcased the efforts of programs expanding their footprint to the South, as conference realignment shifts the geographical landscape of recruiting.
“When they reached out, it was kind of like, ‘Holy smokes,’” Jerome said. “I was like, ‘Why do they have your film in Boise and even Utah?’ I had to find out where Utah was on the map to understand and research it.”
The same experience could be said for other Utah commits in the state, as well. Stokes Jr., who is a three-star cornerback from Weiss High School in Pflugerville, Texas, chose the Utes over notable offers from Florida State, TCU, Arizona and SEC powerhouse LSU.
He was in attendance for Utah’s home loss to the Wildcats two weeks ago, but came away even more impressed with Utah’s coaching staff and personnel due to their handling of the loss. He spoke to his head high school coach Vernon Hughes about the visit and said he is “100% locked in.”
Hughes says that over the past five years, Utah — and other former Pac-12 programs — have started recruiting the suburbs of major Texas cities harder. He also coaches Adrian Wilson, a four-star wide receiver out of Weiss High, who is now committed to Utah’s Big 12 rival Arizona State.
ASU beat out Colorado and the Utes for his talents, another clear sign that Texas is becoming a battleground for the former Pac-12 programs.
“Arizona State, they’ve already kind of been in Texas for years,” Hughes said. “Utah hasn’t been around near as much as they have been recently. The fact that those guys have come around, and the fact that they have moved into the Big 12, they are starting to kind of sprinkle down into Texas a little bit more than they have been normally.
“Whenever they recruit in Texas, they hit the hot spots like Houston and Dallas. Now you see more of those other schools from the West Coast — including Oregon, Arizona State and Arizona — really hitting Austin and San Antonio and these other parts of Texas.”
Up north in Missouri, the Utes’ focus on the Midwest can be seen. Utah tight ends coach Freddie Whittingham has heavily recruited tight end Drew Clemens, who is a three-star tight end out of Oak Park High School. His father and high school head coach Ken Clemens said the Utes started recruiting his son late in the spring.
Eventually Freddie Whittingham took a trip to Kansas City to work out Drew, talk with his parents for several hours and set up an official visit in Salt Lake City. Before Utah’s tight ends coach reached out to him, Drew knew nothing about Utah or its program.
Outside of Wyoming, it was the only program from the West to lobby him with an offer. Now, as Big 12 programs fly into and play in more of the surrounding states they can recruit more players, create more brand recognition, especially if they consistently win.
“I think that some of these West Coast teams are coming back into (the Midwest) trying to get a footprint around here,” Ken said.
“This place is still, I think, untapped. I think the sparsity of big-time programs through the Great Plains will probably change as the West Coast teams are coming across the plains and in the country.”
As Utah continues to create a pipeline in the Southeast, their efforts also benefit the under-recruited players like Clemens, Stokes Jr. and Fuller III. Their families can travel to close away games in the surrounding states. But, it also gives them an opportunity to make their mark at a P4 program.
“I think it is a benefit because they’re going to find that gem,” Jerome said. “For Utah, after talking with them for almost a year now, that’s exactly what they’re looking for.”
Hughes added: “I just think it is good for somebody like (Stokes Jr.) because he is someone that has a very, very high ceiling. He’s someone that, if he gets into the right program like Utah, can go and be a second-round NFL draft pick. You can go to LSU and get lost or you can go to Utah and develop.”
How will it work?
Tom Luginbill spends his time traveling, talking to college programs and appearing on TV as ESPN’s national recruiting director. And he has watched the recruiting map shift as he’s crisscrossed the country in recent years.
Whether it be the former Pac-12 programs in the Big 12, the Big Ten or even the ACC, programs like Utah have been forced to rethink their recruiting strategy. Now, as the Utes start pouring resources into the Southeast and Midwest, it’s a game of trying to make things work.
“I think the question that every staff has to ask themselves is whether or not their time is being well spent in an area that’s so far away,” Luginbill told The Tribune. “These programs are not going to bring five, seven guys from that area every year. So the question is can we get that same player within a 300-mile radius of our campus?
“They have to, I think, work through a couple of recruiting cycles to see how it works and prove that the fruits of your labor are warranted. If you’re going to be, if you’re going to be UCLA, and you’re recruiting 10 kids out a year, every year, out of Ohio or Illinois or Michigan, and you’re not signing any of them, then you’re wasting your time.”
Josh Omura, formerly Arizona and now Washington’s director of recruiting, can attest to that. The Huskies focus — much like the Utes — largely on the West, particularly in their own state, California and the surrounding areas. But, now that they’re facing teams like Michigan, Ohio State, Indiana and other Midwestern programs in the new-look Big Ten, there is expanded recruiting curiosity in those regions.
Alongside that, UW has a national identity since it made it to the national championship a season ago.
“I think that there has to be a consideration,” Omura told The Tribune. “With some of these different states that we will be playing in, some of these places might now be viable for them or their parents, whereas in the past it might’ve been because of the location of the old Pac-12.”
In the Huskies 2025 recruiting class, they have landed commitments from three players from Illinois, Maryland and North Dakota. Before Jedd Fisch took over for now-Alabama head coach Kalen DeBoer, Washington didn’t land a commitment in any of those states in its 2024 recruiting class.
That’s a sign their efforts are starting to pay off.
“I just think you have to be smart with it,” Luginbill said. “You have to pick your spots.”
So what about Utah? With spot recruiting, as Blechen describes it, the Utes have found and earned commitments from players in Texas and Missouri but have run dry, for the time being, in the rest of the Southeast.
“When Utah is recruiting, they’re recruiting Southern California, the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii,” Luginbill said. “It’s been so fruitful. (Conference realignment) gives you more options. It gives you more guys on the board each and every year to potentially target, because now your brand is going into that city every other year.”
In all, it might take a few years for the Utes, and other programs, to see if the experiment works in their favor. Blechen and Utah’s coaching staff talked round and round about how and where they might recruit in the Big 12 before joining the conference.
“There’s going to be two to three kids in probably every class that are coming from a state where maybe we’ve never recruited somebody out of that state before,” Blechen said.
Now, they’re making a new footprint, but whether or not it stays in the dirt is the real question.
“The answer to all of this may take a few years to bear itself out,” Luginbill said “You’ll have to see how much of a household name you become and how successful they are within the conference before we know.”
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