Why football recruiters target multi-sport athletes

Texas Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian, TCU head coach Sonny Dykes and Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko shed light on why college programs seek two-sport high school athletes.

The notion that high school football players should specialize on the gridiron for the best opportunity at an FBS scholarship is a myth.

In an examination of the three recruiting cycles from 2022-24, DCTF found that of the 607 high school signees to the 13 FBS programs in Texas, 404 (66.5 percent) played at least one other sport at the varsity level. Track was the most popular second sport by a wide margin, accounting for 83 percent of all multi-sport athletes, followed by basketball, which constituted 27 percent of two-sport athletes. The graph below represents the percentage of each program's high school signees classified as multi-sport athletes over the three cycles. 

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