Editor’s Note: This is the fifth installment of a five-part series on the Mississippi State football team’s recruiting methods.
STARKVILLE — Mike Villagrana and Andrea Hollis had just met when they first collaborated on their shared pet project. Villagrana as Mississippi State football’s director of recruiting and Hollis as its director of on-campus recruiting, they crafted a master plan for a gameday visit at Davis Wade Stadium.
They presented that plan to the rest of the staff and were met with bewilderment.
“When we first got here, I think people thought we were crazy when we talked about how we wanted to operate a visit,” Villagrana said.
What caught everyone off-guard was the detail: the paragraph of details outlining each step of a visitor’s trek through a game day, no detail left unaccounted for. It takes several pages to log just a few hours of a prospect’s way through the facility. As Villagrana told The Dispatch in an exclusive interview, this is how MSU sells itself: in the details.
“The details in everything we do is going to help us get there. It’s a by-product of Joe’s championship standard,” Villagrana said.
“The detail in it needs to be on point, from the person who’s holding the door to the person who’s doing the visit questionnaire, to the way the carpet is to the way the light is dimmed. What kind of music do we have on? Did we get with the janitors to make sure everything is cleaned? Did we do a sweep of the building to make sure everything is first class? The transition of everything, make sure everything is flowing, is important.”
None of that is an exaggeration: when The Dispatch spoke with Villagrana just over a week ago, Villagrana had just paid a visit to the recruiting suite that is part of a $3.6 million project inside Davis Wade Stadium, one that is also renovating MSU’s locker room. On that visit, they showed Villagrana how to dim the lights.
It should be no surprise that Villagrana is as detail-oriented as he is, given his boss, head coach Joe Moorhead, is the same way. Villagrana recalled times when he would give Moorhead a spreadsheet of information, all the labels at the top of columns centered — except for one. Moorhead would mark it and ask Villagrana if he could straighten that for him. Villagrana appreciates it; their former boss, Penn State coach James Franklin, was the same way.
They believe getting every detail right is what can set them apart.
“When a guy gets in on campus, we want a five-star visit,” Villagrana said. “They’re going to go to Alabama and they’re going to get a first-class visit, they’re going to go to Auburn, they’re going to go to LSU. What are we going to do here to make us different?”
As much effort as MSU puts into each visit, Villagrana knows that one day will not be enough to secure the services of the highly touted recruits they chase. Pulling that feat takes months, if not years, of relationship building and marketing. For that, MSU has a plan, too.
MSU’s marketing plan is more or less divided into three prongs: the athlete, the athlete’s parents and the coach. They want to do as much as they can to educate each party on the history of the program, the vision for it under Moorhead and the academic opportunities MSU provides, so they will hit all three in a rotation. If the prospect gets an academic mailer one day, he will get recruiting mail about either the history of the program or Moorhead’s vision for it next; meanwhile, the information about academic opportunities rotates to the prospect’s parents.
“You have to hit them all. We have to have a good relationship with them, I think that’s huge,” Villagrana said.
“As far as our marketing plan goes and what we provide the coaching staff, we have a plan from day one. We just made it up for the next five months: each kid is going to get assaulted with information that is going to make sure they understand the tradition that happens here, what Joe is about and what this staff is about, the Dawg Walk. The kids in Texas are going to get it, the kids in Virginia are going to get it and the kids in south Mississippi are going to get it, too.”
Villagrana feels the relationship with the high school coach is particularly important, both in relation to the prospects currently being recruited and future prospects that coach might have to offer. Moorhead got a head start on that by retaining director of high school relations Brad Peterson, assistant director of recruiting communications Rod Gibson and former recruiting specialist Pat Austin, who has since left the program. Both Moorhead and Villagrana praised those three for helping Moorhead quickly develop relationships with in-state high school coaches over the winter recruiting period, in his first weeks on the job.
The staff has only advanced those relationships both with assistant coach hires — tight ends coach Mark Hudspeth and offensive line coach Marcus Johnson are both Mississippi natives, plus the retention of Mississippi native cornerbacks coach Terrell Buckley — and consistent communication. Villagrana said Moorhead does a quote of the week each Monday and they send it to high school coaches; on occasion, MSU assistants on the road for recruiting have seen those quotes displayed in the high school programs they visit.
“If you do the marketing first class, you do the visit part first class,” Villagrana said, “then you can say to that five-star recruit, ‘Why not?'”
All together, the pitch is already working. MSU’s 2019 class, with 16 commitments, is already ranked 18th nationally in the 247 Sports Composite; only one of MSU’s classes over the last five years cracked the top 20.
Villagrana didn’t feel much of that momentum in August, during a dead period, but he’s confident more is on the way. The recruiting staff will surely generate some of that with their approach and their details, but more than that, MSU will stop selling a vision. They’ll have visuals to show.
“When we’re winning some football games, it’s going to be pretty easy to get some momentum then, too,” Villagrana said.
Follow Dispatch sports writer Brett Hudson on Twitter @Brett_Hudson
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