One of Nik Valdiserri’s many tasks as the recruiting coordinator at Vanderbilt is to constantly monitor what’s going on with recruits on the Commodores’ radar. At any moment, he’ll want to know who else is offering one of their top targets. Or what the program’s competitors are up to as they, too, build their class. Every day, he studies that information — staying up to speed in the ever-changing landscape that is college football recruiting. The next day, he’ll do it all over again.
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Fortunately for Valdiserri — and dozens of other recruiting coordinators like him — he’s got some help. That’s where Zcruit comes in.
Vanderbilt is one of 90-plus FBS programs that subscribes to Zcruit, a recruiting database largely unfamiliar to fans of college football but paramount for many recruiting staffers working tirelessly behind the scenes. The database uses an algorithm to monitor the Twitter activity of thousands of recruits across the country as they announce their various offers. It then logs that data in one place for subscribers to easily access — and spy on each other.
Every morning at 6 a.m. users such as Valdiserri receive an email that includes curated information they’ve specifically requested about recruits and other schools. Throw in the fact that Zcruit also has the rights to video footage from Rivals prospect camps around the country, and it’s become an invaluable part of the evaluation process.
Cory Nicol is the director of Zcruit. He played cornerback at Montana State in the late 2000s, then started his career in personnel departments at Northwestern, UCLA and Cal. Northwestern is the original home of Zcruit, where former student Ben Weiss first developed the program with a few friends who knew how to code before selling it in 2017. The Wildcats were the first customers to sign up. Old Dominion came next. Now, a vast majority of Power 5 programs subscribe to the service.
Division 1 CFB recruits smarter with Zcruit
ACC: 12/14 schools
Big 12: 10/10 schools
Big Ten: 11/14 schools
Pac-12: 8/12 schools
SEC: 13/14 schools86% of P5 schools
56% of G5 schools73% of all FBS schools
🏈🧠🤓 pic.twitter.com/FM2H9mfClN
— Zcruit (@ZcruitFootball) June 13, 2023
To get a sense of what Zcruit does and why it’s so valuable, The Athletic spoke with Nicol for the July edition of our monthly recruiting Q&A.
Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What is Zcruit and how would you explain it to people?
I guess the elevator pitch is: It’s a system to identify prospects and track recruiting information in a more efficient way. We do that through data aggregation and a couple pretty cool notification systems to help our users consume the information better. We’ve also got a couple partnerships — with like a Rivals camp series or a NextGen — where we host this video and data that college coaches find interesting, and they use it to supplement their evaluations.
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When I was talking to the Vanderbilt recruiting department, they walked me through what a normal morning looks like when they get on Zcruit. For their purposes, they can track what other academic schools are doing, what Group of 5s are doing and check in on other programs in Tennessee and/or the SEC. If I am a Power 5 recruiting director and I’m using Zcruit every day, what does that look like?
What they do is probably not so different from what a lot of the other Power 5s would do.
We have a couple of notification systems, where I can customize the alerts that I’m gonna get. There’s a lot of noise out there that I’m sure you’ve seen on Twitter. Kids are tweeting offers and commitments left and right. Things are being retweeted and yada, yada, yada. There’s 247Sports posting commitments and decommitments and offers. Same with Rivals. And now On3 is doing the same thing. So there’s a lot of noise out there. What we were able to do is basically take all that noise, control that noise and basically allow the user, allow the coach to extract what’s just going to be important for them. So for instance, if I’m Vanderbilt, and I know I’ve got a high-academic threshold I’ve got to hit on a lot of these kids, I might want to track and just see what Northwestern and Stanford and Duke and Wake Forest and kind of those like-academic schools, what they’re doing. To track who they’re offering, who’s committing to them, so on and so forth.
The thing that a lot of schools like to do is they like to take their coaches’ recruiting areas and plug that in. So if I’m Coach XYZ, I can create a filter that’s going to be just Coach XYZ’s area. Say he’s got Florida, Georgia and Alabama. We can curate notifications that are just relevant to him and what he’s looking for in his area. So if he says, “I only want to know about Power 5 offers in my recruiting footprint,” we can go ahead and create a filter that’s going to just report that news to him. Only that news. So he can block out everything else and just focus on what’s important to him.
We can customize Zmails, customize reports for coaches. And most of the time, that’s based on position. Each coach recruits a position and then each coach has a recruiting area that they’re responsible for — a number of states or counties or a combination of both of those. And so basically, we can get some really curated information. And that usually just serves as the starting point for that coach, where it’s, “Hey, this kid popped up. Johnny Johnson popped up in my area and just got offered by Northwestern. I don’t know this kid. But if Northwestern’s on him, he’s probably got some sort of grades. So I’ve got to go and check this kid out.” At that point, Vanderbilt would probably take that kid and start him in their funnel and start to do some initial research on him and just check everything: “Does this kid have grades? Can he play? All right. Let’s get him going down our evaluation pipeline.”
I feel like I’d spend my whole day on this, creeping on other programs.
You can definitely go down some rabbit holes and just kind of get lost in the data. It just goes to show there is so much information out there with the recruiting services, Rivals, 247Sports, On3, Twitter. So much information out there, so much noise. But when you bring it all into one spot, you aggregate all the information, it is pretty cool to look at it in a really plain view, through a really clear lens. That’s what Zcruit does pretty well.
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If I have Zcruit and I’m a wide receivers coach at Georgia, can I see what every one of your users is also up to? If I’m curious, can I see what Washington is doing?
If I’m at Georgia and I’m the receivers coach there and I want to know what the receivers coach at Washington is doing, yeah, I could very easily go in and I could pull a list of who Washington has offered at the wide receiver position. I could go in and pull a list from, we have kind of like a ticker-style, wire-style, Twitter-style tool where, yeah, I can see who Washington has offered lately at the wide receiver position. So yeah, you can track other schools specifically. In the same vein, I could go into Zmail, which is our daily alert email, and create a filter that says, “I want to be notified any time University of Washington offers a wide receiver.” Just lock that in. And then anytime the University of Washington offers a wide receiver, then you would get an email about that the next day telling you who the kid is.
So 10 assistant coaches at the same school can be getting 10 completely different reports and personalized emails?
Yep. Yep. Absolutely.
When Zcruit is gathering that data, is it algorithm-based? Talking to kids? Rivals camps? How are you sorting your information?
It’s a good question. One of the cool things about Zcruit, we don’t have any communication with student-athletes or anything like that. It’s just all — it’s tech. Our development team, six or seven years ago, whatever it was, they went ahead and built a system via technology that allows us to pull in all this information and then divvy it up and distribute it in the correct way. So no hands touch that, which is cool. It’s a system that just continuously runs so it’s all technology.
As social media evolves, if I’m a recruit and I’m on Twitter but I’m also on Instagram and now I’m on Threads, would ZCruit pull from all of those places to let this database know I have an offer?
Instagram, no. Threads, no. Twitter is the one that we really, really honed in on and were able to pull a boatload of information from that. So we’re not gonna pull from every single source out there, but the way that we do it, we could pull from what’s publicly available out there and (on) Twitter and we can really give people and users a really robust picture of what’s going on. We feel really good about the amount of data we’re able to bring in (and) give people a really good picture.
I feel like if I’m a coach and I don’t want to deal with the changes on Twitter and whatever is going to happen to Twitter, knowing I’m paying this subscription to do it for me is so convenient.
Totally. And technology just moves so fast. It’s like, one minute here we are, the next minute it’s, “Hey, what’s Threads? Everybody’s on Threads now. OK, here we go.” And then yeah … who knows what’s going to happen to Twitter.
Let’s say I’m a recruit and I either get an uncommittable offer or I’m tweeting out an offer that I, in reality, don’t have. Do you still include that information? Is it incumbent on the coaches to figure out what’s legitimate and what’s not?
That’s correct. And you’re right about that. There’s misinformation out there. We found probably 99.5 percent of it to be true. And so the way that the technology works, is you have to take whatever’s posted out there to be the truth. Now, if somebody messages us and says, “Hey, we didn’t offer this kid” or “Hey, something’s off with what you guys are doing,” then we have systems where we can go in and change that and fix that. And that happens every once in a while for sure, but I’ve found it to be about 99 percent accurate of what it pulls in.
What kind of feedback do you get from coaches?
I’ve been here almost five years now and it’s been a fun rise.
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We get a lot (of feedback). A lot of people really enjoy Zmail and it really helps them save a lot of time and what a lot of schools and users would say is, “Yeah, we don’t have to go waste time and scroll through Twitter all day. Scroll through 247Sports or Rivals when you can just go to one place, check in a couple times a day and see what’s new.” It’s going to allow you to be a lot more efficient and spend more hours in the day doing what’s important and figuring out how you’re going to land these kids, which is the real challenge. Identifying them is one thing. But landing them is the whole other challenge.
Do you have any competitors?
There’s plenty of competition these days trying to do similar things, but Zcruit was the pioneer in the data aggregation and notification space.
What is your background?
My first job in college football was working at Northwestern (from) 2012 through 2015 (as assistant director of player personnel). Worked there for a few years and then my next opportunity came at UCLA. I was there for just about a year with Jim Mora. It was Year 5 of Jim Mora. I ended up working as a scouting analyst on the defensive side of the ball. I worked with Matt Bernstein and Pat Girardi and a lot of great coaches who were there. And then when Justin Wilcox got the Cal job, a friend of mine, Marques Tuiasosopo, who was working with me at UCLA, went up there to take a job with Cal and then three or four months later he brought me up there with him to be the director of personnel. I did that for a couple more years and then in 2019, I jumped off and joined Zcruit.
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton for The Athletic; photo: Adam Davis / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
