Michael Lev: UA football, Brent Brennan smartly recruiting Texas with Big 12 arrival imminent

Yeehaw!

Brent Brennan and his staff are doing work in the state of Texas, y’all.

They’re pulling coveted three-star prospects out of the Lone Star State.

Arizona is messing with Texas, and the Wildcats are fixin’ to make it a habit.

As of Tuesday afternoon, following a flurry of recruiting activity, Arizona had 15 verbal commitments for the class of 2025 — its first under Brennan’s stewardship. Six of them hail from Texas.

This is a notable development on many fronts.

First of all, Arizona’s foray into Texas coincides with its impending move to the Big 12. The UA, ASU, Colorado and Utah officially become members later this summer.

It’s no accident that 40% of Arizona’s recruiting class to date consists of Texans. It’s intentional, and it’s smart.

Brennan hinted that something like this was in the works when he met with Tucson media last month. Regarding recruiting here vs. his previous stop, San Jose State, Brennan said:

“It is different just because the location and the footprint is different, and where we’re going to play our conference games is different. Where before we knew we were going to play most of our games in California or somewhere in the West, it was easy with the population in California and the talent base in California to recruit California kids. Now knowing that we’re going to be going to Texas and Oklahoma and Florida, that opens up some other areas where we know there’s a lot of talented football players. So that pushes us out a little bit more across the country.”

A “little bit” might be an understatement. Over the past nine days, Arizona has added this Texas sextet: tailback Wesley Yarbrough from Crosby, athlete Sean Robinson from Cibolo, receiver Terry Shelton from Carrollton, safety Allen Gant from Lubbock, cornerback Swayde Griffin from Lago Vista and cornerback Gianni Edwards from Forney.

Persuading Texans to take their talents to Tucson is not new for UA football. Two of the most significant contributors to the program’s turnaround, tailback Michael Wiley (Houston) and safety Dalton Johnson (Katy), are from Texas. So is kicker Tyler Loop (Lucas). And Christian Young (Houston). Among others.

What’s different about this is the volume.

Arizona already has six Texas commits, and it’s still June. In the previous three cycles, per 247Sports’ database, the Wildcats had a total of three recruits from Texas who signed and appeared on a UA roster at some point (or are still expected to).

Jedd Fisch and his staff pulled most of their recruits from California. Californians made up 54.2% of the 2022 and ’23 classes — the only ones that were all Fisch.

The last time Arizona had as many as six Texans in a class was 2021, the last of Kevin Sumlin’s classes. During the Pac-10/12 era, the correlation was clear: Whether the UA pursued prospects from Texas depended almost entirely on the head coach’s connections and preferences.

Sumlin coached at Oklahoma, Houston and Texas A&M. The classes he was involved in here (2018-21) averaged 5.5 recruits from Texas.

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Rich Rodriguez rarely went there. If you take out his first class (2012, started by Mike Stoops) and his last (2018, shared with Sumlin), Arizona had only one signee from the state of Texas under RichRod’s watch. That would be El Paso safety Tristan Cooper, class of ’16.

Was that a tactical error by Rodriguez? Probably. Texas is overflowing with prospects. No state in the union can match Texas’ combination of people (30 million-plus) and people who love football (est. 30 million-plus).

Rodriguez’s predecessors, Stoops and John Mackovic, thrived in Texas. The 247Sports database reliably goes back to 2002. From ’02 to ’12, Arizona never had fewer than three Texans in any class and averaged just over six. Texas recruits from that era included future NFL players Mike Thomas (DeSoto), Earl Mitchell (Houston) and Trevin Wade (Austin).

Stoops coached at Kansas State and Oklahoma before coming to Arizona so, like Sumlin, he had plenty of Texas connections. Likewise Mackovic, who was the head coach at the University of Texas from 1992-97.

What makes what this staff has done especially impressive is that the head coach and most of the assistants he brought from SJSU didn’t have those sort of Hook ’Em hookups.

Brennan is as California as it gets. He grew up in Redwood City, attended UCLA and has never coached east of Tucson. He says “cool” and “awesome” a lot.

Brennan had a hand in eight recruiting classes at SJSU (2017-24). More than 85% of those players were from California high schools or junior colleges. The 247Sports database lists just one player — out of 162 — from Texas.

Yet just months into the job here, Brennan and his UA staff have established a substantial presence.

What’s changed? For starters, SJSU didn’t have Duane Akina, who coached at UT from 2001-13. Akina is listed as the primary recruiter for two of the six Texans in Arizona’s 2025 class, including Griffin, the son of Cedric Griffin, who played for Akina in Austin.

The Big 12 factor cannot be overstated. One-fourth of the new-look league consists of Texas teams: Baylor, Houston, TCU and Texas Tech. The Wildcats will make regular visits to the state, and it isn’t that hard to get there from here — or there to here. That’s a huge draw for recruits and their families.

It used to be that you could pitch annual visits to L.A. and the Bay Area to recruits from Southern and Northern California. That’s no longer the case. Brennan and his staff have adjusted accordingly.

They’re still active in California, with one-third of the 15 recruits hailing from the Golden State. That’s nowhere near the ratio of the Brennan-led SJSU program.

Is the current pace in Texas sustainable? I don’t see why not. They say everything’s bigger there, and that includes the appetite for and investment in football. Last year, Melissa High School, located about 45 minutes north of Dallas, opened a $35 million, 10,000-seat football stadium. More boys play tackle football in Texas than any other state, and it isn’t close.

As Brennan himself said, “You gotta go where the players are.” If it just so happens to be the same place where a quarter of your new league plays — deep in the heart of Texas — all the better.