Signing Day madness
Posted: Monday, February 04, 2008 11:18 AM
A couple decades ago, longtime college basketball coach and voracious reader George Raveling said: “After reviewing more than 60 sports sections from across the nation, I have yet to find one college football coach who didn’t have a great recruiting year. Where did all the average players go?”
While the jab may have been fueled by the playful rivalry between college football and basketball coaches, it was indeed true. Back then, before the Internet gave birth to a multitude of recruiting pontificators and prognosticators, a coach’s class sometimes could be as good as he wanted it to be … until the players actually started playing, of course.
Nowadays, it’s nearly impossible to keep secrets or mask failings. Within the wacky year-round world of college football recruiting, there is certainly no shortage of folks readily available to point out every team’s hits and misses. And they’ve already got the jump on 2009 … as has USC’s Pete Carroll.
I’m not comfortable with it, but we live in a nation where “five-star” players schedule press conferences and play shell games with college caps. And we’ve got these lists that not only identify the top 250 players in America, but also confidently assign a specific ranking to each.
With every player inking a letter of intent having been assigned some sort of value these days, every coach doesn’t have a good recruiting year anymore. If fact, if he’s interested, a website can be easily found that will tell him how bad he did.
With all that as a backdrop, Wednesday (Feb. 6) is a holy day for college football fans across the nation. It’s an annual occasion so important that we now capitalized it. Yes, it’s “Signing Day.”
The countdown is on. And so is the heat.
Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State will be holding their breath to see if Jeannette (Pa.) High School quarterback Terrelle Pryor chooses their school, while the rest of the Big Ten hopes he heads west to be an Oregon Duck.
Signalcallers that stand 6-foot-6 and can get their 230 pounds through a 40-yard dash in 4.4 seconds are truly special, so his decision -- or at the very least an update on it -- will be nationally televised.
The absolute definition of a dual-threat quarterback, Pryor rushed for 4,250 yards and threw for 4,249 over the course of his prep career. So, with visions of a “bigger, stronger Pat White” dancing in his head, Rich Rodriguez is faced with his first chance at losing to Jim Tressel. And if he does, it will be every bit as painful to him as the ones Lloyd Carr endured.
Similarly, Julio Jones, a 6-foot-4 receiver from Foley, Ala., has Crimson Tide fans on pins and needles, hoping he doesn’t leave the state and bolt for Florida, Florida State or Oklahoma. Check out all the devastating stiff-arms Jones puts on defenders in this highlight video. Can you imagine him teaming up with Tim Tebow?
Another hotshot, supposedly the top prep running back in the nation, Darrell Scott of St. Bonaventure High School in Ventura, Calif., is reportedly a sure bet to be leaving his home state. But we won’t know if he’ll be headed for Austin or Boulder, until we watch him put on a Longhorn or Buffalo baseball cap to instantly headline and elevate that school’s class.
Speaking of the “team competition,” with most its scholarships already accounted for, it looks like Florida has the inside track on ending up with the make-believe title of No. 1 recruiting class. (How soon will be before they start handing out trophies for this stuff?)
If it’s not the Gators, then Notre Dame might finally have something to cheer about. But until further notice, Florida coach Urban Meyer deserves the top spot. I don’t see Charlie Weis working overtime to help recruit for the women’s gymnastics team.
