Will Texas’ Glut of Talent Hurt Them in Recruiting? Competitors Say ‘No’

The Texas men’s swimming & diving team earned 26 individual swimming invites to this year’s Division I NCAA Swimming & Diving Championship meet.

That means they had to cut 8 individually-qualifying swimmers from their roster, with likely 1 or 2 more cuts to be made once Texas decides how to handle its divers.

Among the 8 cut so far are 3 swimmers (Ethan Heasley, Ethan Harder, and Cole Crane) who were seeded to score points in at least 1 event. Also among the 8 cut was senior Luke Bowman, who is the grandson of head coach Eddie Reese.

• See the first 8 that Texas dropped

This is not the first time that a team has qualified more swimmers than they can take: both Texas and others have done so. But, this is the culmination of the mystique of Eddie Reese, combined with a rather-affordable in state tuition rate and top-quality coaching, to draw in an incredibly-deep and talented field of athletes.

When all is said-and-done, Texas will have dropped more swimmers from their NCAA roster than most teams will qualify for the meet. Those extra 9 or 10 athletes help them in reputation, though not at the meet: they still face what projects to be a tight battle with the defending NCAA Champions from Cal (15 qualifiers), and those swimmers they left home can’t score points.

What strikes me most about the conversation around Texas’ qualifiers is the dramatic difference in perspective between elite swim fans and elite swim coaches.

The immediate reaction from swim fans was that this will, at some point, hurt Texas’ recruiting. That swimmers would eventually decide that they prefer to go somewhere else and make the NCAA roster rather than be left home year-after-year (some swimmers are cut from the NCAA roster multiple times).

There are, of course, swimmers with Olympic dreams for whom the fear of missing the NCAA roster is secondary to the goal of making the Olympic roster. For those swimmers, going to a program that has proven the ability to train swimmers for Olympic medals is a no-brainer. Though, the counter-argument of course is that Texas isn’t the only place to train to be an Olympian – plenty of other programs with room on their NCAA rosters (Cal, prominently, and NC State, among others) have trained Olympians and Olympic medalists.

And for fans this desire to see those swimmers go elsewhere makes sense. We want the NCAA Championship meet to be the fastest swimmers, no matter what team they swim for, but we also want to see good team battles, more parity in the sport. All of these things are fun for swim fans and, as a commercial entity, good for the sport.

But when you talk to coaches at the country’s best college programs, even those that have never had this overqualification “problem,” they have a wildly different perspective.

Almost unanimously, those coaches who I’ve spoken with say that kids will continue to go to Texas: that they’d rather go somewhere where the coaches have proven the ability to get swimmers to the top level, and many would rather be left home on an NCAA Championship team than make the meet for a 6th-10th place program.

As one top 10 coach pointed out, the top high school swimmers have a ton of confidence when they make their recruiting decisions. The best swim coaches in the world are calling them daily, courting them, telling them about how those swimmers’ futures will look. When they sign, they have absolutely no doubt that they’ll make the NCAA roster, score points, and contend for national championships.

One coach even said that asking about making the NCAA roster showed a “lack of confidence” and was a “red flag” in recruiting.

But what is perhaps most interesting is that they’re not transferring out when they realize that they haven’t made the team. And that is, perhaps, the most magical part of what Eddie Reese has built at the University of Texas.

A 17-year old can be convinced of anything by a good coach and a good recruiter. They can be shown a vision and buy in. But 19, 20, and 21 year olds are primed to become jaded when they see that vision not coming to fruition.

Confidence is an incredible driver in sports. The rush and wave of confidence can be the difference between champions and those forgotten by history, and to those who push through the pain and those who succumb to it. A team title combined with a strong team culture can keep the confidence high even for those members of the team whose egos are bruised by being left home.

Does this mean we should expect for Texas to qualify 30 athletes (swimmers and divers) for the NCAA Championships every year? Almost certainly not. That level is unsustainable by anybody, and almost flukish (Texas was less impacted by COVID restrictions than many parts of the country, fewer mid-majors to contend with). Even the venerable Texas Longhorns don’t get their training and tapers quite right every season, and there are enough programs with momentum right now (NC State, Texas A&M, Georgia) to start pulling that away. Even in swimming, a sport that lends itself to dynasties, things are cyclical: remember the dominance of Auburn in the 2000s, and that program this season didn’t qualify any relays for the NCAA Championships.

But with 4 more top 20 recruits coming in from the class of 2021, the stable will continue to reload with the talent to do it.