MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Veteran Mountaineer Sports Network analyst Dwight Wallace was sitting in my office the other day telling old recruiting stories from when he coached at Colorado.
 
He recalled the time when he had a great in-home visit with Anthony Munoz and how difficult it was trying to pry him away from USC, which he couldn't.
 
He said there were countless times when he put a lot of effort into a recruit only to watch guys like John McKay, Woody Hayes or Bear Bryant make one phone call and sign the guy he worked like hell trying to recruit.
 
The late Bobby Bowden, who had success recruiting at West Virginia and, later, great success recruiting at Florida State, once said of recruiting at WVU, "Once you cross that (state) line you are next. You're not No. 1."
 
Don Nehlen immediately realized this when he took over in 1980, so he quickly calibrated his approach to look for hidden gems or players that he thought he could develop into great football players.
 
Unlike horseshoes or hand grenades, finishing a close second in recruiting does you no good.
 
"Our 1988 team played for the national championship, and we never had one kid that was on anybody's (top 50 recruiting list)," Nehlen once recalled. "Our '93 team, maybe Jake Kelchner, who transferred from Notre Dame, was probably on those lists.
 
"Coaches have to believe in what they see," Nehlen said. "They have to believe in their own evaluation system. Heavens, we played pretty good football at West Virginia and put a ton of kids in the pros and that was because we dug up a lot of kids that a lot of people didn't want."
 
Rich Rodriguez frequently took that path as well.
 
"We've got guys that have no stars that have been pretty productive and did a great job of developing their games," he once said. "Pat White wasn't a five-star recruit. We battled (to sign him), but nobody wanted him as a quarterback, and there are a lot of guys out there right now that would love to have Pat White as their quarterback."
 
But occasionally, it can be worth it to take some chances, especially when you trust your instincts.
 
The other day, touted redshirt freshman linebacker Josiah Trotter, among the most heavily recruited players Neal Brown has ever signed, brought up his West Virginia recruitment.
 
The Philadelphia resident was a nationally rated prospect, whose father Jeremiah was a four-time Pro Bowl player for the Philadelphia Eagles and his older brother Jeremiah Jr. an established linebacker at Clemson.
 
Josiah was getting daily phone calls from Ohio State, Oregon, Notre Dame, Penn State, South Carolina and, of course, Clemson, among many others.
 
And Jeff Koonz from West Virginia.
 
"The crazy thing is, West Virginia came a lot later on after I had a lot of those big schools, and I never thought I would be here until coach Koonz reached out to me and started texting me pretty consistently," Trotter recalled.
 
Koonz, who has been on a recruiting roll as of late, admitted yesterday that the reward sometimes outweighs the risk of wasting a lot of time on a heavily recruited player with no ties to WVU or the state of West Virginia.
 
It takes lots of persistence, great instincts and self-confidence to pursue players like that.
 
"Josiah was a kid that there were a couple of different things," Koonz explained yesterday. "One, there might have been a little intimidation on some people because of his dad and his brother and what is he going to be? (Josiah is) an excellent football player who played at a really young age at a great, nationally ranked program and played in national games.
 
"It was one of those deals where there was a connection early on with him," Koonz recalled. "I called and he answered. One phone call turned into two phone calls and there was some consistency.
 
"I think there was maybe some other inconsistencies, for whatever the reasons, and some people probably thought he was going to Clemson, or some people thought he was going to go wherever?" he said. "I didn't listen to any of that, and he didn't listen to any of that, and it just kind of worked out with the relationship that was built there. When he came to campus, to our guys' credit and to our players' credit, to the state of West Virginia and Morgantown, he got here, and he fell in love with the place."
 
"He kept reaching out," Trotter noted. "I took a visit, fell in love with it, the scheme, the coaches, the area and how the fans treated the team and what the WVU logo really means to the people of West Virginia. I really loved seeing Karl Joseph and (recently retired) Tavon Austin make an impact on this team and this state, and I want to do that and really bring that back to West Virginia."
 
Being genuine and real matters in recruiting and starting with Neal Brown on down to all his assistant coaches and staffers, those attributes have always shined through in their dealings with young prospects.
 
"You know when they need or they like you as a recruit, and you want to go where they need you and not just like you – or even want you," Trotter explained. "They didn't just like me, they needed me and wanted me. That was something that set them apart from everybody else."
 
"I think that's a testament to coach Brown," Koonz offered. "You are not going to win every recruiting battle, and you've got to be really smart with your resources and really smart on how wide of a net (you cast), but at the end of the day, it's really hard to recruit 40 guys extremely, extremely hard. So, you've got to find those guys you have a connection with, and you've got to find those guys who check every single box and, yeah, you've got to go all in."
 
He continued.
 
"You've got to be willing to go, 'Hey man, if we don't get this …' and that's part of recruiting. To be honest with you, that's the same for multiple guys in the room because we really narrow it down and we've done a really good job of trusting our evaluations being around these guys. 
 
"Some guys are really hard gets and some guys were not as hard, but at the end of the day, they all checked all of our boxes, and they were all priorities in the recruiting process," he said.
 
Which now includes some nationally recruited prospects without any West Virginia ties who are open-minded enough to listen to the great opportunities here at WVU playing in a power conference with a rabid fan base eager to support winning football teams.
 
Those are great selling points, for sure, but it also takes a lot of thought and effort to land players like Josiah Trotter, Wyatt Milum, Rodney Gallagher III and others here with many other options.
 
"I'm extremely proud and happy to have them all here because a lot of work went into each and every one of them," Koonz concluded.
 
No on-field activities are scheduled for today.
 
The Mountaineers resume practice on Friday and then will have their second closed scrimmage of fall training camp Saturday inside Milan Puskar Stadium.