It doesn’t matter which recruiting service you go to, but go to any and see if there are any commits for the 2025 class. High school commits. I know there will eventually be transfers that roll in, but as of right now, there are none. And I’m pretty sure that’s intentional.

If you look at the 2024 class, there’s Drew Steffe, who was a commit under the prior staff that McCasland honored, and Eemeli Yalaho, a completely unknown and off-the-radar player from Hudson, Ohio via Finland. Yalaho had been offered by McCasland at North Texas and was really the only high school commit that McCasland was responsible for in the 2024 class. The list of offers for the 2024 class was largely the work of the prior staff and Mark Adams, not of Grant McCasland.

McCasland really decided that he would have to sit the 2025 class out. My theory is that McCasland is about the long-term relationship and even though he’d be here a year, it wasn’t enough time to really pull together the type of class that he and Kellen Buffington had a vision for and you can’t create actual relationships with high school parents and players overnight or maybe even within a year.

Looking at the 2025 offer list and it’s quite a bit more intentional. Kids from Duncanville, Waxahachie and Houston with a few other states, but this isn’t a class that has offers to every possible player, but rather offers to some guys that you get the feeling are very intentional.

McCasland and Buffington don’t have a list of players from all over the country, of the 21 players 12 are from Texas (1 of them is Patton Pinkins which is former assistant coach Al Pinkins’ son and he was going to play where dad is coaching, which is Ole Miss). That’s a pretty heavy Texas lean especially when you consider the recruiting landscape and when you look at the 2024 offer list, which is really all over the country.

This isn’t supposed to be anything super deep, just noticing that McCasland arrived and pretty much immediately decided that he wasn’t going to invest heavily into the 2024 class and if there was a 2023 commit, i.e. Yalaho, then that’s great and that’s gravy, but it wasn’t intentional. It wouldn’t surprise me if McCasland offered a guy for the 2024 class, a one-off, but it appears that the 2025 class is intentional and that class and beyond is where McCasland is going to start building high school class.

And I don’t know if this gives you any solace knowing that it didn’t appear that McCasland was ever in this for the short term and without the Baylor job looming, I do think that McCasland thinks that he can do the same that Scott Drew is doing at Baylor at Texas Tech. He has the blueprint and he knows that trying to recruit high school kids is a long-term investment and McCasland appears to be making that investment.