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Football is the most visible college sport in America and one of the least understood at the recruiting level. The D1 narrative, the one with the staged hat ceremonies and the scholarship offers on signing day, is what most families have in their heads when their son starts getting mail. That narrative covers about two percent of the kids who actually play college football.

Here is the rest.

The honest version of football recruiting

There are roughly one million high school football players in the United States in any given year. The number who go on to play college football, at any level, is around 75,000 across all four years of college eligibility. That is roughly seven percent of high school players ending up on a college roster somewhere — and that includes walk-ons.

Of that 75,000, the breakdown is approximately:

  • D1 FBS: ~12,000 roster spots across 134 schools (full headcount scholarships, 85 per school)
  • D1 FCS: ~14,000 roster spots across 128 schools (equivalency, 63 scholarships divided)
  • D2: ~13,000 roster spots across 169 schools (equivalency, 36 scholarships divided)
  • D3: ~24,000 roster spots across 246 schools (no athletic scholarships)
  • NAIA: ~9,000 roster spots across 91 schools (scholarships allowed, equivalency)
  • NJCAA: ~3,000 roster spots across 65 schools (scholarships at most levels)

The takeaway: more kids play football at D3 than at D1 FBS and FCS combined. Almost twice as many. If your son is a serious player who wants to keep playing, the math overwhelmingly says the answer is below D1.

This is not a consolation prize. D3 football is fast, physical, and well-coached. The two-time defending D3 national champion would beat half of FCS rosters in most years. The level of play below D1 is significantly higher than most parents expect when they have only watched Saturday TV.

What recruiting looks like, by level

D1 FBS

The recruiting machine. Full-time recruiting coordinators at every program. Recruiting budgets in the millions. Official visits are paid trips. NIL collectives are now part of the conversation at most programs. Recruiting starts as early as eighth and ninth grade for elite prospects, with verbal commitments routinely happening by sophomore year.

If your son is a legitimate FBS prospect, you will know. The first sign is not a form letter. It is a position coach calling your high school coach by name and asking for transcripts. By tenth grade, he has been to at least one game in person.

If you are wondering whether your son is FBS-track, he is probably not. The kids who are at this level have been on the radar of the right people since seventh or eighth grade through 7-on-7, combine circuits, and elite camp invites. The rest of the system runs on volume mailers and questionnaires that mean almost nothing.

What an FBS offer actually means: A committable scholarship. Either full ride or nothing. Roster spots are fixed at 85 across four classes, so each year carries about 25 to 30 scholarship slots. The competition for those is intense.

D1 FCS

The most underrated level in college football. FCS programs are large, regional, and often more financially honest than FBS. The 63 equivalency scholarships are divided across the roster, so most FCS players are on partial scholarships combined with academic and need-based aid. Some are walk-ons.

FCS recruiting picks up later than FBS, often in the spring of junior year. Camps and combines matter. Many FCS programs run their own one-day prospect camps in June, and that is where evaluation happens. Showing up matters more than having a highlight reel.

Realistic FCS prospect: All-state level player at most positions. Can be all-conference at the right size. Schools at this level recruit specific positions hard depending on need.

D2

Often misunderstood. D2 is competitive football. Some D2 programs would compete in FCS. The scholarship math is similar to FCS in practice — 36 scholarships across the roster, divided equivalencies. Most D2 players are on partial scholarships supplemented by academic aid.

D2 recruiting timelines run later than D1, usually picking up significantly in junior year and continuing through early senior year. D2 staffs are smaller, so coaches recruit specific regions hard. If you are within a four-hour drive of a D2 program, they are watching.

D3

This is the largest division in college football. No athletic scholarships, by NCAA rule. The recruiting model is fundamentally different.

At D3, recruiting goes through admissions. The athletic department’s job is to identify players who can play and who fit the school academically. Once that fit is established, the financial conversation happens through the school’s regular admissions and financial aid process. Strong students at academically strong D3 schools often get academic merit aid that exceeds what they would have received as a partial scholarship at D2.

The recruiting calendar at D3 runs longer than D1 or D2. Many D3 commits happen in the fall of senior year, often through Early Decision, which is where the best D3 financial aid is typically structured.

What “being recruited at D3” looks like in practice: A coach reaches out. You fill out a questionnaire. You take an unofficial visit. You go to a camp. Test scores get submitted. Transcripts get evaluated. Admissions runs the financial aid pre-read. You see the package. You commit.

It is less dramatic than D1 and significantly more honest. The financial conversation happens up front. There is no NIL collective. There is no signing day theater. There is just a four-year deal that is either right or wrong.

We will be straight here: many of the parents we work with at the D3 level eventually tell us that this is the level they wish they had focused on earlier. The fit, the academics, the cost, and the football combined to produce a much better four years than they expected.

NAIA

The most flexible of the four-year college options. NAIA programs allow scholarships, often combined with institutional academic aid, and the recruiting timeline is the most accommodating. NAIA coaches can offer in May for a September start in a way that NCAA programs typically cannot.

NAIA football has produced NFL players. The talent ceiling is high at the top NAIA programs. The conferences are regional. The roster sizes are usually smaller than NCAA equivalents.

If your son’s recruiting process has not produced offers by spring of senior year, NAIA is a real path that often gets overlooked. Most NAIA coaches will respond to a direct email with a highlight reel and academic transcript.

NJCAA (Junior College)

A development path. Many JUCO players use it as a two-year step toward D1 or D2. Others find a four-year stop along the way through transfers. The pace is fast, the football is physical, and the recruiting cycle is the most direct of any level.

JUCO is also a real option for academically borderline students. NCAA D1 and D2 academic eligibility rules are strict. JUCO requires a high school diploma or GED and clears the player to compete while building college transcripts that can transfer.

The football recruiting calendar

Football is a late-developing sport in the recruiting calendar compared to baseball or lacrosse. Here is roughly what the timeline looks like.

Freshman year. Off the radar at all but the very top of the FBS world. Build the GPA. Get on the field. Get bigger.

Sophomore year. Some camp activity, mostly at D1 level. NCAA D1 contact rules generally open at June 15 after sophomore year. Your son can attend college camps in the summer between sophomore and junior year, and these matter for D1 evaluation. For everyone else, this is highlight-reel building season.

Junior year. The core recruiting year for football across most levels. Camps in the summer before junior year and the spring after junior year are the highest-leverage events your family can attend. Position-specific evaluation happens at these camps, not in your kid’s high school games. College coaches need to see your son in pads against equivalent talent, and high school games rarely provide that.

Senior year. For D1 prospects, mostly already committed. For D2, decisions are happening in fall and winter. For D3, NAIA, and JUCO, this is the peak of activity. Many D3 commits happen in October and November of senior year through Early Decision. Late-bloomer recruiting at D2, NAIA, and JUCO can happen all the way through spring of senior year.

The infrastructure: how exposure actually works in football

High school games. Useful for evaluation, less useful for being seen. Most college coaches are working their own games on Saturdays during the season and watching film in the evenings, not driving to your son’s high school game on Friday.

Hudl. The film platform almost every program uses. Get your son’s account set up. Make it clean. Tag plays clearly. College coaches can request access.

Highlight reel. Three to five minutes, max. Best plays first. Your son’s number visible. No music, or music low. Junior year highlight reel is the one that matters most.

Camps. This is where football recruiting actually happens at most levels. There are four types worth knowing:

  1. A specific school’s on-campus camp. Held in June. The coaching staff at the school you are attending evaluates you directly. If your son is a real prospect at a particular school, this is the most important day on the calendar at that school. We cover the decision tree below — whether to go to a given school’s camp is one of the highest-stakes choices in summer recruiting.

  2. Satellite camps. A satellite camp is a college program running a camp away from its own campus, often hosted at a high school or a partner university. The host program is there. Sometimes other programs come along as guest staffs. Satellite camps were the way that schools without big recruiting budgets used to reach kids who could not afford to travel. They are still useful, but they are tricky. We have a section below on how to read them.

  3. Regional combines and showcases. Some are useful, many are predatory. The honest test is whether college coaches actually attend in numbers. The big regional events and the major regional 7-on-7 circuits do draw coaches. Many smaller “exposure camps” do not. Ask your high school coach which ones are real.

  4. Conference and multi-school showcases. A growing category. Some D3 conferences and groups of regional schools run combined showcases where multiple programs evaluate kids in one day. These are excellent value for football below the D1 level. If thirty colleges are at one event evaluating your son in pads, that is thirty conversations in one day.

7-on-7. Has become a year-round circuit, especially in the South and West. Useful for skill positions. Less useful for linemen. Costs vary widely.

Combines. State and regional combines run by high school football coaches associations are often the cleanest, most cost-effective exposure events for non-D1 prospects. Coaches at multiple levels show up. Your son gets timed, measured, and evaluated. Find the one in your state.

Should your son attend a specific school’s camp? A decision tree.

A school’s one-day camp — sometimes called a prospect camp, an elite camp, or an ID camp — is a specific event you have to decide whether to drive to and pay for. Here is how to make that call.

Step 1: Has the school actually contacted your son?

A camp invite that came as a mass email or as part of a recruiting questionnaire follow-up does not count as contact. We are talking about a position coach or recruiting coordinator who has emailed your son specifically, by name, about this camp, and ideally has watched film.

If yes, attending is almost always worth it.

If no, go to step two.

Step 2: Is the school on your son’s serious list?

Meaning: would your son seriously consider going there if offered a spot? If yes, even a cold camp with no prior contact is worth attending one time, because it is the best way to get on that staff’s board if you are not on it yet.

If no, do not attend. A school’s camp is not a generic exposure event. It is an evaluation by that staff for that program. If your son does not want to play there, he is paying $50 to $200 to be evaluated by people whose opinion does not matter to his future.

Step 3: Is the camp at the right level?

Some D1 programs host camps that double as money-makers for the program. Hundreds of kids show up. Most are not D1 prospects and will not get individual evaluation. If your son is a D2- or D3-level player, attending a D1 camp at a school that is not realistic for him is mostly an experience day. The evaluation he wants is at the D2 or D3 camp.

If the level is right and the contact is real, go. If the level is right and there has been no contact, send an email two weeks before camp introducing your son and saying he plans to attend. That changes how the staff sees him on camp day.

Step 4: What does your son want out of it?

Two legitimate reasons to attend a school camp where the level is a stretch:

  • Your son wants to see the campus and meet the staff in person. A camp combined with an unofficial visit is a productive day even if the football evaluation is not the main outcome.
  • Your son wants to know where he stacks up against players being recruited at that level. This is real information. If he wants it, the camp can deliver it.

What is not a good reason: showing up because the camp invite arrived in the mail and the family assumed it meant something. Camp invites are mass marketing at most schools.

The honest summary on school camps. The best ones for your son are at schools that are realistic for him, where the staff knows he is coming, and where the level matches. Two to four of those a summer is plenty. One serious camp at the right level beats five hopeful camps at the wrong level.

Satellite camps: useful, but read them carefully

A satellite camp is a college program running its camp away from its own campus. The setup is usually one of two patterns:

Pattern 1: Host university, multiple guest staffs. A regional university hosts a camp and invites guest coaching staffs from other programs to evaluate alongside them. This is the more useful version. Your son might be evaluated by five to fifteen schools in one day, often spanning D1, D2, D3, and NAIA. For families that cannot drive to ten different campus camps, this is high value.

Pattern 2: Single program holding camp at a remote location. A college program holds its camp at a partner high school or a regional facility, usually near a recruiting hot zone. This brings the program closer to athletes who cannot travel. Useful if your son is a real prospect at that one program. Less useful otherwise.

How to read whether a satellite camp is real. Three things to check before paying:

  • Which staffs are confirmed to attend? Real satellite camps publish the list. Make sure it is more than just the host program. If only one or two staffs are confirmed and the rest are “to be announced,” wait to register.
  • What is the format? Position-specific evaluation with film access is real. A lineup of generic drills is not. If the camp is mostly 40 times and a few cone drills, the evaluation depth is shallow and probably not worth a day plus travel.
  • Has anyone you trust been before? Your high school coach, your son’s position coach, or another family who has done it. Word of mouth on satellite camps is the most reliable signal you have.

One important nuance. A coach at a satellite camp is working a long day in a hot place to evaluate dozens of players. He is not necessarily prepared to do a full sit-down with your son between drills. If your son wants face time with a specific staff at a satellite camp, send an email two weeks ahead and ask if a brief in-person meeting at the camp is possible. Most coaches will say yes. None of them will object.

Visiting campus

If a school is on your son’s list, get him on campus. Unofficial visits are unlimited at every level and can happen any time. The official visit is a paid trip that NCAA programs can offer at specific points in the recruiting calendar — for D1, generally beginning August 1 before junior year. For most families, the unofficial visit is the workhorse.

What to actually do on a visit. The point of a visit is to evaluate the school, not to be evaluated. Coaches are not bringing your son to campus to test him. They are showing him what the place is like. Your son’s job is to walk around like a college student and see if it fits.

A productive visit includes:

  • A meeting with the head coach or position coach, in person, in the football office. Twenty minutes, minimum.
  • A walk through the locker room, weight room, training room, and team meeting room. He is going to live in those spaces for four years.
  • A tour of campus that is not just the athletic facilities. Where will he live freshman year? Where will he eat? Where is the library? Where do classes meet?
  • A sit-down with a current player, ideally one who plays his position. A real conversation without coaches in the room.
  • A meeting with admissions and financial aid, if the school is academically driven and your son is a strong student. At D3 schools, this is essential — admissions is where the financial conversation happens.
  • A class visit, if the timing works. Sitting in on a class for forty-five minutes tells him more about the academic culture than any tour can.

What to skip. The “wow” parts of the official visit playbook can be misleading. Sideline access at a game is fun but tells you nothing. The dinner at a coach’s house tells you something about the head coach’s family and very little about whether your son will start. Hospitality is real, but it is not data.

Questions for your son to ask the coach, not for you to ask:

  • Where do you see me playing? At what position? In what year?
  • Who is in front of me on the depth chart, and what is the timeline?
  • What does redshirting look like in this program?
  • How many players in my position group are in the current roster, and how many are in the next two recruiting classes?
  • What is the academic support look like during the season?
  • What happens to my financial aid if I am injured?
  • What does the average week look like in season? In the spring? In the summer?

Questions for you to ask, separately:

  • What is the four-year cost, projected with annual increases?
  • What does the financial aid renewal look like each year?
  • What is the medical insurance picture?
  • What is the housing arrangement freshman year, and how does it change over four years?
  • What happens academically and athletically if my son needs to medically retire?

These are parent questions. Ask them when your son is not in the room. Coaches expect them. They do not affect how the staff sees your son.

Reading the visit afterward. Two questions to ask in the car on the way home:

  1. Does your son sound like he wants to go to school here, separate from football? If yes, that is a green light. If he is only excited about the football, dig further. The football part is twenty hours a week. The rest of the school is the rest of his life.
  2. Is the staff someone you trust? You will meet a lot of coaches over the next year. The single biggest predictor of whether your son will be happy in college football is whether he believes the head coach and position coach are honest with him. Visits are where you get to evaluate that. Trust the read.

How to communicate with college coaches

Most of the recruiting mistakes we see are not about athletic ability. They are about communication. Here is the playbook.

Email is the primary channel. College coaches live in their inbox. A clean, well-written email from your son with film attached gets read. A long, generic email with no film does not. A direct message from your son’s social media account is hit or miss. A phone call from a high school junior to a college coach he has never met is awkward at best.

The first email. Should come from your son, not you. Should be five sentences or less. Should include:

  • His name, year of high school graduation, position, height, and weight
  • His high school, jersey number, GPA, and test score if available
  • A working Hudl link or a YouTube link to a current highlight reel
  • One or two sentences about why this specific school interests him
  • A clear ask: usually, “I would appreciate any feedback on my film and any information about your camps and your recruiting process.”

That is it. No flattery. No life story. No mention of how dedicated he is. The film tells the football story. The email is the cover letter.

What to put in the subject line:

  • “[Name] — [Class Year] [Position] — [State]”
  • Example: “Marcus Williams — ‘27 OT — Texas”

That is the format coaches scan most efficiently. Class year is the most important piece of information in the subject line because coaches mentally sort their inbox by class.

Follow-ups. If your son does not hear back after two weeks, one follow-up is appropriate. Same email, with a sentence at the top noting the date of the original. After the second email, if there is no response, move on. Repeated unanswered emails do not become more attractive over time.

Once a coach replies, communication frequency should match what the coach sets. If he replies every two weeks, your son emails back in roughly that rhythm. If he replies same-day with a phone call, the relationship is hot and your son responds quickly. Read the temperature.

Phone calls. When a coach calls, your son picks up the phone. If your son cannot answer, he calls back within a few hours. If a coach asks about your son’s family or admissions on the call, it is appropriate for your son to say, “Coach, would it be alright if my parents joined for that part of the conversation?” That is not weakness. That is good judgment. The coach is grateful.

When your son makes a phone call to a coach, he has a reason: scheduling a visit, confirming attendance at a camp, asking a specific recruiting question. He does not call to chat. He does not call to “check in.” He keeps the call to ten minutes or less.

Social media. Coaches use it. They watch how recruits behave online. The rule is simple and absolute: nothing your son posts, retweets, or likes should be something he would not want a head coach reading aloud at a team meeting. If there is anything questionable, clean it up before the recruiting process gets serious. Coaches will look. They look more thoroughly than parents realize.

A direct message to a coach on a platform like X is acceptable as a quick follow-up, but the substantive communication should go through email. Tweeting a coach’s school logo at the program with a “blessed and excited” message is not communication. It is performance.

What not to do, ever:

  • Do not have a parent send the email. Coaches can tell within two sentences. The email gets deleted.
  • Do not send a generic email blasted to twenty programs with the wrong school name in it. We have all received them. They get deleted.
  • Do not list a lengthy academic transcript or unprompted lists of awards in the first email. The film and the GPA tell us what we need to know.
  • Do not promise a school anything you are not ready to deliver. “I am very interested” is fine. “I will commit if you offer” is binding in a way most kids do not realize they are signaling.
  • Do not lie about anything, ever. Heights, times, weights, GPAs. Coaches verify all of it. The lie is always discovered, and the relationship is over the moment it is.

Communication cadence over a recruiting cycle. For a school that becomes serious for your son, the rhythm usually looks something like:

  • Initial email and questionnaire: spring of sophomore year through summer
  • Highlight reel update: January of junior year
  • Camp attendance: summer between junior and senior year
  • Unofficial visit: fall or winter of junior year
  • Coach call: when the staff is ready to be specific
  • Full evaluation conversation: fall of senior year
  • Offer or admissions decision: senior year

That cycle takes twelve to eighteen months. Patience is part of the job.

The mistakes football families make

After two decades of recruiting football players and watching families navigate this process, here are the patterns that come up over and over.

1. Believing the form letter. Every D1 program sends thousands of recruiting questionnaires. Filling one out is not being recruited. A camp invite is not being recruited. A “we are interested” letter from a recruiting service is not being recruited. Being recruited means a position coach can identify your son by name in a phone call.

2. Chasing D1 too long. Almost every parent we work with has spent time chasing the wrong level for too long. D1 is real. It is also small. If your son is not on a D1 program’s actual board by spring of junior year, the D1 conversation is functionally over. The mistake is spending the summer between junior and senior year still chasing it instead of going hard at the D2, D3, NAIA, and JUCO programs that are actively interested. Time spent chasing is time not spent committing somewhere good.

3. Treating the highlight reel as marketing. It is evaluation tape. Coaches do not want to be sold. They want to see your son block, tackle, run, throw, catch, or cover. They want to see a left tackle’s feet. They want to see a corner’s hips. They do not want music videos. The shorter and cleaner your son’s tape, the better.

4. Getting in front of the coach-to-player conversation. Coaches will tell you the truth: they do not recruit parents. If you are answering questions on the visit, talking to the coach on the call, or sending the emails, you are slowing your son down. The single most attractive thing to a college coach is a player who runs his own recruiting process.

5. Not running the net price calculator. We see families fixate on partial scholarship amounts at D2 and walk away from D3 schools where the four-year academic merit aid is significantly higher. The D3 sticker price is misleading. The actual price after merit aid, especially at private liberal arts schools, can be very competitive with a partial scholarship offer at a less-academically-strong school. Run the calculator on every school. Then compare.

6. Skipping the academic conversation. Football recruiting at every level is more academic than parents realize. D1 has minimum NCAA Division I academic standards. D3 admissions has its own bar that varies by school. D2 has its own NCAA standards. The single biggest accelerator of your son’s recruiting is a strong GPA. We have watched 6-foot-3 linemen with 2.5 GPAs lose offers to 6-foot-2 linemen with 3.7s. The 3.7 expands his options at every level. The 2.5 closes them.

7. The bad first email. The single most preventable recruiting failure we see is the first email a player sends to a coach. Either it is a parent writing on the player’s behalf, or it is a generic blast with the wrong school name in the greeting, or it has no film attached, or it is six paragraphs long when it should be five sentences. We delete those emails inside of fifteen seconds. A clean, direct, five-sentence email with a working film link and a real subject line gets read every time. The email is not a small thing. It is the thing.

What we tell football parents in every first conversation

Pick your son’s three favorite levels of college football based on actual research, not on television. Build a list of fifteen to twenty schools across those three levels. Fill out their questionnaires. Get the highlight reel done by January of junior year. Get to two to four camps in the summer before senior year. Run the net price calculator on every school on the list. Stay out of the coach-to-player conversation. Then let your son drive it.

If you do those things, by November of senior year your son will have a college football home that fits him. That is the goal. That is what the process is for.

Up next

  • Basketball recruiting — coming
  • Baseball recruiting — coming
  • Soccer recruiting — coming
  • Recruiting and the academically strong student — coming

Written by a current Division III head football coach with two decades of recruiting experience across every level of college football, including direct work with families navigating offers from D1 through JUCO. — Jeff Thomas for Parent Coach Playbook

Last updated April 2026.