Ending World of College Football Recruiting

By: D. Scott Fritchen

The man of the hour stands inside the third-level theater room at the Vanier Family Football Complex. He's been in the building for several hours now. Early-morning workouts cause him to reset the alarm clocks — because he just wants to evaluate how the current players are doing. Yes, 36-year-old Greg Svarczkopf doesn't miss a thing involving the current members of the Kansas State football team — even though his official role on the football staff is Director or Recruiting.

He like to observe the grit. He likes to feel the toughness of players doing drills on the practice field in the indoor practice facility or weight room. And he likes to evaluate. High school or college? It doesn't matter. It takes Greg back to his father, Chris, a 2020 Hall-of-Fame high school football coach inductee in Indiana, and how his father coached and got the best out of the players over a career at Bishop Dwenger High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It takes Greg back to when he was a walk-on linebacker at Indiana from 2008-11. It takes Greg back to teaching middle school social studies while breaking in as a full-time coach at Division III Trine University, then volunteering on the Indiana coaching staff, then eventually moving to New Mexico in 2017. He originally served as a graduate assistant, then one day he was asked to assume a different role.

They asked him to become the Director of Recruiting.

"It was overwhelming at first, but it was probably one of the best things that's happened to me," Svarczkopf says. "I was a one-man recruiting department, so I learned to do everything. That was an invaluable experience for me."

Today, Svarczkopf is briefly running through his path to where he stands today, wearing at Powercat upon a shirt, and the former 5-foot-8, 185-pound walk-on linebacker, is making big noise at the Power 4 level with a program thick in winning tradition, old-school values, and talent that could make the Wildcats contenders in the powerful Big 12 Conference in 2026.

Wasn't too terribly long ago — January 6, to be exact — that Svarczkopf walked through the doors to the Vanier Family Football Complex for the first time after taking an hour-long drive down Interstate-70 from the "other school" down the road. Indeed, Svarczkopf served as Director of Recruiting at the University of Kansas for five seasons, where he recruited a vision.

Now at K-State, he is recruiting a proven track record, and excitement under first-year head coach Collin Klein, one of the greatest players in K-State history, the 2012 Heisman Trophy finalist returning home to coach on the field that holds so many memories, and where many more memories will be made in the coming years.

"One of the greatest players to ever play at K-State is now the head coach, and he's seen success as a player, coordinator and he's won championships doing both, and he's been to the College Football Playoff," Svarczkopf says. "There's creditability with him as your head coach and there's a staff of people who've had a ton of success and who are going to develop talent. You combine all that with the tradition already in place at K-State, and there are a lot of great selling points for recruits.

"There's so much movement within college football. Some coaches look at stops as steppingstones, but Coach Klein wants to be at one place and make it the most successful place. There's instant creditability with recruits and their families because they know it's genuine. That's next level."

And it's reality.

"I got here as soon as I could," Svarczkopf says. "It was fast. I'd known people here. I was floored by the opportunity. Through-the-roof excited to be here. I'd always admired K-State and the history and tradition here. It was an opportunity that I jumped all over immediately. I was floored, through the roof, very, very excited. It's a huge blessing."

First day on the job, Svarczkopf pulled out his cellphone and made his first calls. He phoned 10 prospective student-athletes whom he'd become particularly close on a personal level with over a few years. He introduced himself to those prospective student-athletes as Director of Recruiting for K-State Football. They were both stunned and excited. Then Svarczkopf texted hundreds of other recruits that he had built relationships with as well, and he delivered the news.

Svarczkopf, in a matter of hours, made an instant impact.

"It was a really cool feeling because I'd known these guys for quite a while, had identified them early on, and now I was here at K-State," Svarczkopf says. "The excitement was really fun.

"You could hear a couple smiles over the phone. That was pretty cool."

What exactly do the duties of the Director of Recruiting entail?

"Primarily high school recruiting and overseeing the structure and identifying the talent and the recruitment of student-athletes," Svarczkopf says. "We help each other at the ground level. We're all working together. I oversee the structure of the evaluation process as well as the recruitment overall big-picture recruitment process for the class."

Svarczkopf now rubs elbows with Taylor Braet, the state of Kansas recruiting legend, whom Svarczkopf once competed against for the top talent in the Sunflower State. Now they see each other daily and are unified in their vision and goals to bring the best talent to Manhattan.

"Taylor has a huge presence about him," Svarczkopf says. "He's very charismatic personality. He loves K-State. We met in passing my first year at KU at the 2021 High School Coaches Clinic in Wichita. You can immediately tell the number of high school coaches he knew on a personal level. It was very impressive. It felt like every single high school coach that was there knew him. The numbers were in the 100s it felt like."

In Svarczkopf, K-State landed a no-sleep, no-days-off, consummate evaluator and relationship maker, who like Taylor, possesses that bug, that drive, and that unrelenting passion to help identify and sign student-athletes who are the best fit and possess the talent to help the Wildcats collectively elevate themselves to the highest level of college football.

"You have your film evaluation and start building the relationship, seeing an actual game and seeing them in the winter if they're in another sport, and then doing it again in the spring, if possible," Svarczkopf says. "If they're in a state that has spring football, watching them in person. In between there, you're hoping to make as many connections as possible where the recruit can visit unofficially as many times as possible. The official visit is in June. A lot of recruits will have already made that decision that June weekend going into their senior year or as early as the winter or spring before that. The process starts early on, and it's gone faster and faster every year.

"Inherently, just through the success that this program has had for a number of years in the state of Kansas, there's always been a K-State lean within the state of people growing up being K-State fans, so the draw is really just having an opportunity to be a part of that tradition and history, and then continuing that at a high level. Really, something that Coach Klein is really big on, is being the new old-school, because college football, even though it's evolved a ton, really at the end of the day on Saturdays, it's about those old-school values that help you compete and win games. It's about toughness, grit, accountability and competitiveness. For us, that's a huge piece of it, finding players who fit that mold. It's going to be extremely important for us."

K-State plans to lock down the state of Kansas in recruiting.

"Taylor knows the state of Kansas like the back of his hand and could recruit it any day of the week, and he's as good as anyone in the country," Svarczkopf says. "Anything within the seven-to-eight-hour range is going to be where our bread and butter is.

"From the top down, the philosophy is to keep the local kids local here, recruit the best talent in the state, keep that talent here, locked down, and really painting a seven or eight hour radius around campus, and doing a great job of building relationships with those people and prioritizing those people, and keeping them here. It's something that's extremely valued from our head coach all the way down to our position coaches, and it's something we're going to fight really hard to do here."

But, alas, the world of college football recruiting remains ever-changing with NCAA guidelines and enhanced technology that can impact the duties as a recruiter on a college football staff daily, weekly, monthly or yearly.

"The biggest thing is you're really never off the clock," Svarczkopf says. "You're constantly working around the clock. Even if it's a recruiting dead period, you're still watching their film. There are a lot of things that have made it easier but because of that everything is on an equal playing field. It's easier to find recruits and get in touch with those guys than it's ever been.

"You're constantly building the next class, so it's never ending. If it's something you love and you have a competitive nature, and it's something you enjoy doing, it's really never-ending."

For Svarczkopf, that gridiron passion began early.

And it began watching Chris Svarczkopf, who served as head coach at Bishop Dwenger High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana from 2002-2017 and posted a 149-49 career record with six SAC titles, 10 sectional championships, nine regional championships, four semi-state championships and four state runner-up finishes. Greg, who is one of six children born to Chris and Jane, was around football since birth. His grandfather also coached football. An uncle is a football coach as well. So is a brother-in-law.

"Football has always been in my blood," Svarczkopf says. "Some of my earliest memories is riding in the car with my dad and exchanging VHS tapes at a gas station late Friday night and getting up early Saturday to help line the football field. My dad is my biggest role model and someone I've always looked up to and tried to be like.

"When I was growing up in middle school, a lot of people would introduce themselves and tell me the impact my dad had on their life. It's something I wanted to be able to do, was help make a difference in the lives of other people. From a young age, I always wanted to be a coach."

From serving as student assistant after his playing career at Indiana in 2012, to two years at Trine University, to time at University of St. Francis, to graduate assistant at Kent State, to New Mexico, Svarczkopf learned a great deal working with various position groups all across the field. Then came the opportunity to become Director of Recruiting at New Mexico, followed by one year as Director of Recruiting at Army, followed by a five-year stint pulling recruits to Kansas, before Svarczkopf let go, and grabbed ahold of Klein, the Wildcats' storied success, and the chance to help elevate the K-State football program to places it's never been.

"Coach Klein is very open to ideas, and you can talk to him at any time and run ideas through him," Svarczkopf says. "He looks at everything through the lens of, 'Does this help us win games?' 'Does this help us get better?' He has a clear plan for everything he's looking for. He's very calculated in everything that he's doing. He's very impressive to be around daily. As a group of coaches, these are some of the best people I've been around, and they're also very good at what they do. I'm very impressed with the staff that he's put together.

"Everything we do here with recruiting and as a whole throughout the building day to day is extremely important and all the small details matter. There's a high attention to detail. For me, it's a huge honor and humbling that a person who takes this place as serious as Coach Klein does, invited me onto the staff."

He pauses.

"I was floored by the opportunity."

And now Svarczkopf is laboring virtually around the clock to help assemble signing classes this year and next year with a keen eye for talent, with a tremendous sense of responsibility, and with plenty of coffee.

These days, it's also fun to wake up early and evaluate the current players as they perform drill work at the indoor practice facility.

Svarczkopf can never stop evaluating.

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