Posted by: Chris Vannini on February 11, 2013

To be a successful college football coach, you have to do more than coach.

Recruiting is what makes college athletics so much different from other sports around the world. So some coaches have assistants who might be better at recruiting than Xs and Os.

While on WYGM in Orlando, Will Muschamp was asked if he'd rather be the best recruiter in the country or the best tactician. The Gators brought in one of the top recruiting classes last week.

"I think you have to be a mixture of both,"Muschamp said. "Certainly on the staff, I tell our guys when we hire my staff, I tell them, 'If you can't recruit then you're not going to coach at Florida.' The bottom line is getting good players in here and then there's a process of being a good coach, and I think the first thing is you have to be able to evaluate. You have to be able to put the film on and figure out, 'Does he fit in what we want?'

"Then you have to be able to recruit and build the relationship as far as that is concerned. Then when we get them on campus, whether it's in the strength program or the academic program, you have to be able to develop them and coach them on Saturday. Those are the key things you have to be able to do and I think you have to have a good mixture.

"Are some coaches going to be better at Xs and Os than recruiters and some better recruiters than Xs and Os? Absolutely, but it is your job as the head coach to get a good balance on your staff of those guys."

With signing day mostly in the rear-view, the focus is returning to the upcoming deregulations in recruiting this summer. One of those deregulations will be unlimited text messaging, something Muschamp wasn't a fan of, but knows some schools will be.

"There's a reason we stopped texting a while back and that was because of the high school young man sitting in class getting a text," he said. "Some schools will just hire guys but all they do is text all day and text the recruits saying it's the head coach or whoever. We're not going to do that, but a lot of schools will do that. I do think we need to go back and look at it.

"I think the NCAA is trying to push back on the university to regulate, and unfortunately when you're not under the same governing body as far as following the rules then you're going to have some things that are going to make it difficult on everybody else. I would like to go back and study it a little bit more before I ever make a comment, but there's a reason we stopped texting recruits back in '05 or '06 or something like that - because of the time and the money it cost some of the recruits.

"It's easy to say, 'Well, he just needs to tell the school no.' It's very difficult for some of these young men to tell somebody no. It's hard, and some schools don't take no very easily as well. I do think we need to go back and look at it and I think it's going to make things much more difficult."

You can listen to Muschamp's interview by clicking here.

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Chris Vannini is the lead writer for CoachingSearch.com and has covered Michigan State sports for The State News, The Oakland Press and MLive.com. He writes a weekly column for the Detroit Free Press on behalf of SB Nation. Vannini lives in Big Ten country, so his foot speed is far from SEC caliber, but his pulse on coaches is hard to match. Be sure to follow @CoachingBuzz on twitter and send your feedback to chris@coachingsearch.com