How Jedd Fisch and Matt Doherty's restructured UW recruiting staff paid off for Huskies

On Dec. 3, 2025, a smiling Jedd Fisch sat at the podium in Washington's team room at Husky Stadium eager to talk about his program's recruiting successes.

UW had just signed its highest-rated recruiting class, excluding a couple last-minute additions, since 1999, fulfilling a promise the UW coach made during his introductory news conference around 22 months earlier.

"It's what we've strived for since we arrived here," Fisch said on Dec. 3. "It's our second recruiting class. We're extremely proud to have landed this group."

Washington finished the 2026 cycle with the No. 13 recruiting class in the country, according to 247Sports. Eleven players were considered blue-chip prospects, and UW signed its first five-star prospect, offensive lineman Kodi Greene, since quarterback Sam Huard joined during the 2021 recruiting cycle.

All despite UW's personnel department losing three key contributors - Armond Hawkins Jr., Josh Omura and Joyce Harrell - early during the 2026 cycle.

"Really, it was just about sticking to a standard," Matt Doherty, UW's senior director of player personnel, said. "Let's make sure we evaluate well. Let's make sure we know who we're getting. … It's an endurance sport."

But UW didn't simply replace the staffers it lost. Fisch regularly refers to the modern college football landscape as an arms race. Every program is trying to distinguish itself by spending money on facilities, amenities, coaches and, of course, players. And before UW's highly successful 2026 cycle, the Huskies invested heavily in an expanded personnel department to better identify and sign high-school talent.

"We'll be able to evaluate players at a higher level because of all the people helping with evaluation," Fisch said on Feb. 26, 2025, after announcing his restructured personnel department. "We'll be able to recruit at a higher level."

Replacing and restructuring

Doherty and Fisch's relationship dates back to 2011, when the current UW coach's tenure as quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator at Miami coincided with Doherty's first stint as the Hurricane's director of player personnel. They reunited briefly at Michigan in 2015, and when Fisch took the Arizona job in 2021, he hired Doherty to lead his personnel department.

So three seasons later, when Fisch flew north to Seattle to become UW's 31st head football coach, Doherty was on the plane with him.

At UW, Doherty found an intriguing personnel department built by former coach Kalen DeBoer. It was a young group, composed heavily of Pacific Northwest locals like Harrell, the daughter of former Seattle mayor and UW football player Bruce Harrell who served as director of on-campus recruiting, and recruiting assistants Jacob Crawford and Erik Hamburg.

Doherty also rehired Mar Bactol, a former recruiting staffer during the Chris Petersen and Jimmy Lake eras, as director of recruiting operations, a new role focused on admissions, compliance and cooperation with campus administration. Having staffers with local and institutional knowledge, Doherty said, helped make the transition fairly straightforward.

"I can't speak highly enough about the group that was already here and had things running," Doherty said. "It was as abrupt for them as it was for me in terms of the upheaval. So grateful to them, whether they're still with us or not."

Doherty incorporated Bactol and the DeBoer holdovers with the staffers he brought from Arizona: Hawkins, Omura and Syndric Steptoe, a former Wildcat football player who'd spent nearly a decade at his alma mater in various development roles.

Despite their late start on the 2025 recruiting cycle because of the coaching change, Doherty and his personnel department still signed a top-25 class.

Their success led directly to attrition. Hawkins was hired as North Carolina's defensive backs coach in January, 2025, following former UW defensive coordinator Steve Belichick. Omura departed to become Arizona State's executive director of player personnel and recruiting two weeks later, and Harrell joined him in Tempe, Ariz. in April.

Doherty and Fisch used the departures as the impetus to reorganize UW's personnel department. They looked for internal candidates first.

Crawford was promoted to director of player personnel, and Hamburg, originally from Edmonds, was named assistant director of player personnel. Doherty praised Crawford's organizational skills, calling the Tumwater native his right-hand man, and complimented Hamburg's abilities as a talent evaluator.

The Huskies made external additions, too. Marcus Griffin, the former Bellevue High standout who played defensive tackle at Arizona and Central Michigan, stepped into Omura's vacated title after spending the 2024 season at California. Lauren Barry arrived from San Diego State, replacing Harrell.

And the Huskies also added two new roles. Former UCLA defensive back Jaleel Wadood, a Los Angeles native with deep ties to Southern California's football scene, was hired as director of high school relations. Silas Clapham, a Bellevue native who'd previously worked as Hawaii's director of player personnel, joined as the director of college scouting.

Griffin and Wadood handle a large share of UW's daily interactions with recruits, Doherty said, while Clapham's job focuses on evaluating current college players in preparation for the transfer portal.

All these new positions represent significant financial investment for Washington. During UW's 2023 fiscal year, DeBoer's first full year in Seattle, the football program spent $1.5 million on recruiting and $3.5 million on administrator and support staff salaries according to NCAA financial reports acquired by The Seattle Times.

During Fisch's first full year at UW, the 2025 fiscal year, the football program spent $2 million on recruiting and $7.4 million on administrator and support staff salaries. And that doesn't wholly reflect the financial impact of UW's revamped personnel department structure, which won't be fully revealed until the 2026 fiscal year's financial report is released in 2027.

Yet Doherty's results speak for themselves. The Huskies signed the No. 59 recruiting class during the 2022 recruiting cycle and the No. 29 class in 2023 under DeBoer. They signed a top-15 class in 2026, and are currently on track to repeat that feat in 2027.

Adjusting for a new dynamic

Despite Fisch's early declaration about signing UW's highest rated class shortly after arriving, Doherty said his staff doesn't care much about rankings. Recruiting stars don't impact UW's evaluation of a prospect.

"If they're going to keep score on that type of thing and hand out trophies, we want to win, he said. "But we don't begin with the end in mind, like we have to sign a top-10 class and then reverse engineer it."

Those rankings can, however, change the cost of recruiting. Fisch and Doherty's decision to restructure the personnel department coincided with the first season of revenue sharing in college athletics following the House v. NCAA settlement that was approved in early June, 2025.

Athletic departments were allowed to directly share $20.5 million with student-athletes for the 2025-26 college athletics season. And that's not counting third-party name, image and likeness (NIL) agreements student-athletes can sign, too. The influx of money, Doherty said, has made evaluation more important than ever.

Before revenue sharing, a poor evaluation squandered a scholarship and a staffer's time. Now, it costs tens of thousands - or even hundreds of thousands - of dollars and a percentage of the school's available revenue-sharing funds.

"There are times where we just got beat," Doherty said. But more often than not, we value a player at a certain number and anything beyond that, we're walking away. Because in our minds, it's not in the best interest of the program to overextend financially."

Money isn't the only reason players commit to a school. Relationships, Doherty noted, still matter. Brandon Huffman, a national recruiting analyst at Rivals, said UW is one of the few programs where position coaches are still heavily involved in the recruiting process.

"You can't just open up a briefcase full of money and expect that to close the recruitment," Doherty said. "You're still going to have to convince these kids to come here. You're not drafting them. There may be one offs where it might work, but then you've raised a lot of questions if that's what it's going to take to get someone."

Cooperation is the key principle to UW's recruiting approach. Potential prospects are initially identified by either personnel department staffers or position coaches, safeties coach Taylor Mays said. The personnel department then makes an initial evaluates the recruit before huddling with the position coach to determine the prospect's fit at UW, helping coaches use their limited recruiting time efficiently.

Doherty said his staff's main goal is to reduce the amount of uncertainty about the type of player and person Fisch and his coaches are getting once the student-athlete steps onto campus. The clunky titles - which even Doherty occasionally forgets - don't reflect the entire scope of any individual job.

"It's a shared effort," Offensive line coach Michael Switzer, who worked with Doherty at Arizona, said. "A lot of people are doing a lot of different things at a lot of different times."

Doherty said Washington's personnel department is positioned for more success in the future. After just one year of recruiting on Montlake, he said the group had a much better understanding of how to pitch prospects at UW, specifically. They have an established visit itinerary. They've refined which aspects of Seattle and campus to exhibit.

And he's confident UW's recruiting momentum will continue in 2027.

"I think we're in position to do what we just did," Doherty said, "and that's build on the last one."

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This story was originally published May 15, 2026 at 6:37 AM.