Outside of Dateline NBC you won’t find grown men watching and tracking teenage boys as much as college football recruiting fiends do. The gross part is that it is as much of an addiction to recruiting fiends as it is to child predators. And both groups can cross the line. We won’t get into how a pedophile operates, but when a grown college football fan starts using Twitter to verbally assault a 17-year-old boy who chooses school X over his alma mater…well…. you may need to get Chris Hansen on the phone. And that may be a sign that National Signing Day (NSD) has evolved into it’s own event. We will try to place NSD into prospective for the uninformed, and later on we have a first hand account of what the recruiting process and NSD was like for a top recruit from the Midwest a few years ago.
The short answer to why NSD matters is that it is like NFL draft day for college teams and their fans. It’s like having a real live fantasy draft. It’s gambling with kids. And sometimes there is real drama too. When a kid like Demar Dorsey from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida makes a last minute change to his college choice (in this case from Florida to Michigan) it’s a real adrenaline rush for that fan base. Think about that for a second. All this 18-year-old boy did was announce where he was going to play college football. And I don’t have any way to prove this (except maybe personal experience), but I guarantee there were thousands of fans in Michigan and around the world that gave a crap. On the other hand, when Seantrel Henderson, of St. Paul, Minnesota didn’t choose Ohio State at his press conference (yes press conference), and it crushed Buckeyes everywhere. It was national news. Some were even calling for Jim Tressel’s job! All because he was not able to convince a 18-year-old kid that Ohio State was the place for him! When I was 18 you couldn’t tell me anything. On the scale of absurd things in life, that has to rank up there for sure.
However, these fans care so much because the easiest way to a college football national championship is by assembling a top notch recruiting class. The rating system is not an exact science, but it’s relatively accurate. When someone is labeled a “5-Star” recruit it doesn’t guarantee they will be a star, but there are definitely a higher proportion of “5-Stars” that turn into NFL caliber players than “2-Stars.” These “star” ratings are more or less based on how well they played in high school, their level of competition, and most importantly their “measurables” such as speed (as can be measured by their 40 yard dash time), strength (bench press, squat, etc…), height, and weight. But as stated, this isn’t an exact science.
Let’s look at this Rival’s rankings list from 2004 (http://footballrecruiting.rivals.com/viewrank.asp)...
You have such amazing “5-Star” talents as Rhett “the used car salesman” Bomar and Jeff Schweiger Jr., whom you have probably never heard of rated ahead of players that turned into good college players such as “2-Star” recruit Paul Kruger (now a starter on the Baltimore Ravens) and “3-Star” Darryl Clark (one of the best QB’s in Penn State history). A few years ago the Ohio State Buckeyes were banking on an elite “5-Star” QB recruit by the name of Justin Zwick. By his sophomore year Zwick was benched for a no named recruit in Troy Smith. The rest is history. There are countless other examples for every other school out there.
Similarly, when a school assembles a “Top 5” recruiting class it doesn’t guarantee a national championship, but a few of these in a row will most likely have the school in contention for years. What happens then is up to the coaching staff and a slew of random factors… will the kid be motivated enough to work his ass off everyday? will the kid steal laptop computers and sell them on Ebay and get kicked off the team? will he party too much? will he suffer a devastating injury? Etc, etc… Basically, nobody knows what will happen to these kids in the future, but by recruiting as many of the high caliber recruits as possible, a coaching staff can assure that they at least have a high baseline of talent.
Which brings up the more sinister side of recruiting. How exactly do these coaching staffs and recruiting coordinators go about convincing these kids to come play for them? I don’t know about you but if I were a kid that had NFL aspirations I’d probably want to go to a school where I could play a lot. That’s not a stretch right? So how is it that some schools continue to be able to recruit a plethora of elite recruits even when they seem loaded at whatever position they are recruiting? i.e….how can school X convince elite QB prospect Y that he should come to their school when they already have elite QB prospects A,B, and C on their roster?
The answer to this has many factors, but recent allegations against schools like USC and Tennessee (these allegations have been summarized in the Jay-Z song “Money, Cash, Hoes”) show that what we see in movies like “Blind Side” isn’t really that sensationalized. Big-time recruiting really is like that. It’s about money and girls, and power and fame. These schools tell these kids what they want to hear. From the time a kid hits 8th or 9th grade he is on every school’s radar. And from there the intensity increases every year that kid moves toward graduation. Yet, it’s hard to believe these schools really care about the well-being of these kids when a college coach is able to jump jobs after telling the kids he convinces to come to that school in the first place that he is there for life (see: Lane Kiffin). It’s shady business where most kids are convinced that they are the next “Reggie Bush” or “Tim Tebow.” Who knows what these coaches tell these kids. But what we do know is that college athletics are big money now, and the commodities being dealt is are teenage boys. Which means that they will tell them anything and everything they want to hear. And if you aren’t playing the game, you are probably losing on the field.
After the constant recruiting pitches its up to the kids to decide what they want in their college experience. And it’s a juggling act that I know I wouldn’t have been able to balance at 18 years of age. Some schools try to emphasize how they will mold these kids into men, and that they will leave school as complete citizens. Other schools will emphasize that if one attends their school, it is the quickest way to the NFL. Some schools will tell the kids that with the level of competition they have in practice every day, even if they don’t actually play in games, they will be better off for it. Some might emphasize the top-notch education they will receive for free. Still others emphasize, and rightfully so in the battleground that is recruiting, the schools location (“Would you rather go to school in Southern California or Iowa?”) and party atmosphere. Finally, a few schools have the kind of charismatic leaders/head coaches that can convince a kid of anything. These “charismatic leaders” have really taken on a life of their own as well in major college athletics. They are really the politicians and figure heads that represent their respective schools. In the end, only a few schools can combine all of these things. And to be perfectly blunt, that is why schools like USC, Texas, and Florida have dominated the recruiting game during this decade.
Well that ended up being longer than I thought, but there is a lot that goes into college football recruiting. It’s about the characters/coaches, the storylines, the lies, the deceit, the money, the power, and the promise of future fame. And it’s men well into their middle age all the way down to middle school kids that have become enthralled with all the drama and storylines involved in big-time college football recruiting. This isn’t a justification, but an explanation. You may think there isn’t a difference between one of the scumbags on “To Catch a Predator” and a 37 year old man that sits at his cubicle pressing refresh on espn.com on NSD. And you may be right. But I hope this column explained that significance behind why some fans are so obsessed with everything that leads up the Christmas of college football…. National Signing Day!
We also are lucky to have a story from a friend, whom we’ll call Player X, that provides us with a first hand account of what his recruiting experience was like…
My recruiting experience was spread out throughout a longer time frame. I got my first recruiting letter from Washington State after my freshman year. It was surprising, since I was a back up RB at the time, but I had a solid season. That pretty much set the tone for the rest of my high school experience. After my sophomore year I was getting consistent letters from Notre Dame, Michigan, MSU, Northwestern, Cal, Stanford, Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. The summer before my junior year, I decided to go to Notre Dame football camp to see how I measured up. The experience was humbling and I immediately noticed the difference between a "four-star" recruit and just another "guy" they are looking at. Casey Clausen and Rick Clausen were both in attendance, and they just got wined and dined. Funny to think that their little brother became the starting QB for ND. In any case, all the "top recruits" got driven around in a 4-wheel, while the rest of us lowly guys had to walk. I hated Notre Dame. It was horrible. South Bend is quite possibly the worst town I've ever been to in my life. The only cool thing was seeing all the stuff that was in the movie Rudy.
Anyways, after my junior season, when coaches could officially contact you, is when I really started to get recruited. I remember getting calls from the U (Miami), letters from Florida, Nebraska, etc. All were big-time programs. I was a Rivals top 50 recruit in the Midwest, but to get attention like that was crazy. I know my HS football coach was a huge factor in that. He pretty much hyped me up to everyone and he did a great job of selling me. It also helped that my QB, who was a year older than me, ended up committing to Miami on a football and baseball scholarship.
By the middle of my senior year, I had to screen phone calls, because I was getting multiple calls a night on a daily basis. I went to a highly competitive private school for HS and I had at least 4-5 hours of homework a night. There was just no way I was getting it done. The craziest thing for me was getting a call from a random school that I had no prior recruiting association with. For example, all of a sudden I started getting calls from Air Force. I'm like what the hell?
A lot of schools came to my house and to my HS to meet with me and hype up their program. I met with Bret Bielama, who was an assistant coach for Iowa at the time (but now is a Head Coach), several times at my house and at school. Bill Sheridan was the RB's coach at MSU. He came to my house and showed me a tape of TJ Duckett and some other backs. He said if I went there, I would have a shot at being the 3rd string tailback and playing as a freshman. My mom asked me what the graduation rate for players was and it was something like 30% and she immediately nixed that idea.
I’d have to say the craziest thing that happened to me was when I was getting recruited by Michigan, hard. Real hard. I always dreamed of playing there, and it was crazy that I was getting so much attention from them. They wanted me to take an unofficial visit at the spring of my junior year, and commit then. As much as I wanted to do it, I was getting so many looks by other schools, it was too hard for me to just say f it and commit to them. Too many 'what ifs' in my head to justify an early commitment from me. So when my senior year came around, the letters from Michigan came less often until finally they stopped recruiting me all together. They got all the RB's they needed for the class of 2001 to commit their junior year. Oh well…
Senior year was nuts, because I had to plan out all of my official visits. You only get 5. So I had to be careful of where to go and not to go. When it was all said and done, I ended up only going on 2 visits - Cal and Northwestern. I ended up committing after my visit to NU. I canceled my trips to Iowa, MSU, and Illinois. I was going to take a visit to Stanford but something got messed up. But anyways, that’s how it all went down for me. I still have all my recruiting letters at my home in MN. Even the ones I received from the Ivy League schools. I threw away any D-2 and D-3 letters though. Let's be serious, the only D2 I ever wanted to see was the Mighty Ducks movie...
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1 comments:
DAMN YOU DID IT AGAIN SUMAN YOU ARE LIKE SCOTT STORCH MAN TOO SICK WIT IT MAN
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