Huskies head coach shares his approach to building a football roster.
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00:00 >> Going to have here to not only retain who's here or
00:02 maybe bring him back out of the portal.
00:04 But how do you describe what's ahead of you right here in this next few weeks?
00:09 >> Yeah, well, it's certainly an interesting situation here because I
00:12 believe right now there's 17 players in the portal.
00:15 From this roster, there's nine players or
00:17 ten players that have declared for the NFL draft.
00:19 You probably have the most amount of players that are gonna get drafted and
00:24 the NFL will probably come from the University of Washington this year's
00:27 draft. So we know it's gonna be a completely different football team in 2024
00:33 than what the community saw in 2023.
00:37 It's our job to be able to put together the best product.
00:40 And it's our job to do everything we possibly can in what has become a very
00:44 strange college football calendar.
00:45 The transfer portal has closed in regards to the next time it opens is in April.
00:55 The early signing date has almost caused 90% of the high school students
01:00 to sign early.
01:02 So the availability of scholarship players is gonna be interesting,
01:06 to say the least.
01:07 But what we have to do is we don't just recruit for one year.
01:10 We recruit for the eternity of college football.
01:15 We're gonna recruit for a program that we're gonna go out here tomorrow or
01:18 the next day and we're gonna build a 25 class.
01:21 To try to make it the best possible recruiting class it could possibly be.
01:25 And then we're gonna see what happens over the course of these next couple
01:28 weeks on hoping to retain this team the best we can.
01:31 And then if there are other available players that are in the portal,
01:34 then we're gonna look at those as well.
01:36 But what it comes down to is we wanna maniacally recruit daily for
01:40 as long as we are here.
01:43 And we're gonna recruit the 25 class, the 26 class, the 27 class,
01:46 the 28 class and continue to try and build a roster that we can all be very proud of.
01:52 >> Questions?
01:54 Go ahead, Larson.
01:55 >> Yeah, coach, building off of that, how do you view building a roster from a
01:59 numbers perspective high school, transfers?
02:01 How do you go about doing that?
02:02 What's your philosophy on that?
02:04 >> Yeah, we're about development here.
02:06 And what we really pride ourselves is finding high school players and
02:10 developing them.
02:11 One of the issues that's happening in college football is that high school kids
02:16 are being looked over because everybody's in this constant quest and
02:21 the pressure of having to win this exact second.
02:25 The beautiful thing of starting in day two of a lengthy contract
02:31 is that we can find a way to build this team for sustainable success and
02:36 not feel like every year you have to go find transfers to fill holes.
02:41 Now, we would love to be a team that can sign 20 high school kids every year,
02:46 25 potentially.
02:48 And then use what I call free agency or the transfer portal to fill in the gaps.
02:54 When you've coached in the NFL for a bunch of years,
02:56 you learn that you wanna build your team through the draft.
02:59 You don't wanna build your team through free agency.
03:02 You wanna build your team with a mission that you can get players,
03:07 develop players, keep players, retain the players, and
03:11 then bring in people to help you win the championship.
03:14 And that's where our goal is gonna be, and that's what I envision happening.
03:17 - Kim, go ahead.