While Sarkisian scrambles at UW, Wulff grins at WSU

In a way, Paul Wulff is a relaxed man. As relaxed as an intense and tireless head football coach can be, at least.

But with three days until national letter of intent signing day, Wulff is starting to draw in his breath for one very large exhale come Wednesday afternoon.

If there is any anxiety about one of his 20 recruits who have verbally committed backing out, Wulff isn’t letting on.

“Really, I feel pretty good right now,” Wulff said Saturday after returning from a week’s worth of recruiting. “I’m not worried about that. I’m pretty comfortable with the work we’ve done.”

A year ago, Wulff was anything but relaxed. He was just over a month into his job as coach at his alma mater and in a frenzied hurry to build some semblance of a recruiting class. The Cougs only had three verbal commitments when Wulff replaced Bill Doba on Dec. 12, 2007.

“Last year, we had to scramble so much just trying get out there and visit as many kids as we could in about a month,” Wulff said. “You’re cramming 12 months of work into one.”

Once Wulff visited those recruits, he had to sell them on his idea, his philosophy, and his future for Washington State football without any empirical evidence to support his case.

“It’s difficult,” he said. “You have to sell yourself, your staff, and the program.”

Even after a season in which WSU was overmatched on the field and managed two wins in 12 games, Wulff said the job of selling the program is easier.

“The most important thing is to build relationships with the recruits,” Wulff said. “This year we were able to do that. We had 12 months to get to know them and for them to get to know us.”

New University of Washington coach Steve Sarkisian is facing the same situation that Wulff went through a year ago.

Sarkisian was hired in December, replacing fired coach Tyrone Willingham. Since then, Sarkisian has been in a month-long sprint to build a recruiting class, essentially from scratch.

Willingham’s staff had secured only four verbal commitments during the season and one of those, Garfield defensive tackle DeAndre Coleman, changed his mind and committed to Cal.

“Frankly, Willingham was never known as an aggressive recruiter anyway and his lame-duck status really left Washington behind in terms of this recruiting class,” said Allen Wallace, national recruiting editor for Scout.com and founder of SuperPrep magazine. “People have to remember that any time you have a coaching change, the recruiting is affected.”

So Sarkisian arrives at Washington with the same challenges that greeted Wulff a year earlier: a struggling program, a late start on recruiting and few quality commitments inherited from the departed coach.

While Wulff can identify with Sarkisian’s plight, he isn’t sad to have any sort of advantage. He chuckled when asked if he had any advice for Sarkisian.

“No advice,” he said. “There isn’t anything special. You just got to hustle and not slow down.”

To make things more difficult, Sarkisian inherits one problem Wulff didn’t: He has relatively few connections with the state’s high school system.

When Wulff coached at Eastern Washington, he and his staff – a good portion of which are at WSU with him – mined the state, particularly the Puget Sound area, for the best players who were not quite at the Pac-10 level.

Sarkisian started chipping away at that lack of familiarity on the day he was introduced on campus. He attended a press conference, then visited Bellevue and Skyline high schools.

“I think it’s important to get out in the community,” he said the next day. “(We wanted to visit) a couple of the prominent high schools and just let the guys know that we’re going to be available, we’re going to be out, we’re going to try to keep the talent in Washington at home.”

There is little doubt the Cougs won this year’s in-state recruiting battle, locking up the top receiver in Skyline’s Gino Simone along with six other Washington players in a year where there isn’t much depth to the senior class.

Conversely, UW has just two in-state recruits.

What Sarkisian lacks in local links he hopes to offset with his keen familiarity with the recruiting scene in southern California. He said he wasn’t going to try to redirect the guys to Washington he was recruiting while at USC but knows the players and has connections with their coaches.

The formula for most UW glory years has been getting the best players in Washington and supplementing them with the best players from Southern California who aren’t gobbled up by USC and UCLA.

Sarkisian said his sales pitch will include Washington’s traditional strengths: Seattle, the school itself, its football history, its rabid fan base and a huge stadium in a beautiful setting.

He’ll also use its current weakness: That 0-12 record means immediate playing time is open to those who can help. Sarkisian said he wants all players of all classes to believe that if they earn playing time, they will play.

And as he did at USC, Sarkisian also will tell recruits with NFL dreams – meaning most of them – that his system will prepare them for the pros.

The Huskies’ long-established NFL pipeline has sputtered recently, but Sarkisian will stress his team’s pro-style offensive and defensive philosophies as a potential four-year education for a career at the next level.

“We’re trying to stay on the cutting edge of football, and in our era, the cutting edge of football is the National Football League,” he said. “We’re trying to get our kids prepared for that, give them that opportunity after their four years here. Playing in that league is what all kids are dreaming.”

Yet all of that could be secondary to what may be Sarkisian’s chief weapon: the force of his own personality and those of his relatively young and hyper-enthusiastic staff.

Some of that youth and enthusiasm may have contributed to some early stumbles, as the new staff already has put the university in the position of self-reporting a pair of secondary recruiting violations: using a fog machine at Husky Stadium in the recruitment of Wilson High School defensive back Desmond Trufant, then meeting with one recruit in the presence of a high school junior player and a reporter.

But Sarkisian said he believes the same enthusiasm that helped him lure assistant coaches from places such as Southern Cal and California will also help him lure athletes to Washington.

“We’re in the midst of a recruiting battle,” he said. “We’re jumping in, two feet in; we’re going to hit the ground running, we’re going for it. We’re going to get the best football payers available to join this football program.”

Ryan Divish: 253-597-8483

Don Ruiz: 253-597-8808