A recruiting maven I’m not. But once upon a time, while working the mid-morning desk shift for an afternoon newspaper in Columbia, Mo., I put together a never-seen list of maybe 20 NCAA Division I football prospects headed toward the University of Missouri.
I pursued the story the old-fashioned way – I worked the phone – except my contribution to the recruiting beat wasn’t to make a call but, rather, to accept one.
“It’s national letter-of-intent day for college-bound football players,” Bill Callahan, the school’s sports information director, informed me. “If you’ve got a telecopier, I can send you the list of the kids we’ve signed.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Callahan, but our telecopier just stopped working, like, a minute ago,” I lied. “Maybe it’ll be easier if you just dictate the info to me.”
A few hours later, the names of Missouri’s football recruiting class of 1978 appeared together in a newspaper for the first time. It would be several months before any of their names again would appear in a newspaper.
This was 34 years ago, before ESPN made its 1979 debut and a new national newspaper – USA Today – assembled its first high-school All-America team in 1982. This was before a running back from the Mississippi Delta, Marcus Dupree, gained fame for attracting the attention of college recruiters on both coasts and everywhere in between.
Fans eager to track the destinations of the recruiting class of 2012 can tune into ESPNU – it’s among the 300 or so channels affiliated with ESPN’s cable-network empire – which will begin its coverage of national signing day at 6 this morning, and conclude its coverage at 4 this afternoon. That’s right: Ten hours of recruiting-pundit analysis. Compared with the bloated coverage of national signing day, the Super Bowl pregame show on Sunday figures to be as brief as an anecdote told by Tyrone Willingham.
To suggest the public’s fascination with college football recruiting has exploded would be giving short shrift to thermonuclear bombs. In 1978, national signing day found the names of recruits appearing on page 3 of the sports section. Today they’ll be all over the TV, performing the guess-which-hat trick before breathless audiences.
Which brings us to Lakes’ High offensive tackle Zach Banner, whose vacillating between Washington, Southern California and Oklahoma created such interest that I’m surprised a blog wasn’t created under the title of “Zach Banter.”
Banner’s recent announcement that he will enroll at USC was derided by some Seattle sports-talk radio personalities, not so much because he rebuffed the Huskies but that he made his choice amid a celebratory atmosphere at his high school.
The thinking – and I’ll paraphrase here – is that if a local recruit wants to exercise his free-country rights and attend college outside the realm of the UW, he ought to convey that news in the somber confines of, say, the school library. Go ahead and wear the cap of the opposition, and hug loved ones, and take questions from the press, just don’t turn the occasion into the recruiting-season version of an in-your-face dunk shot.
I understand the sentimental attachment about the way things used to be, but here’s the rub: It’s 2012. The recruitment-process culture has changed, and it has changed in a way – 10 hours of national signing day coverage on ESPNU – that there’s no gear for putting it in reverse.
On the same day Banner declared his heart belonged to USC before family and friends and fellow students at Lakes, Jeremy Liggins, a blue-chip quarterback from Oxford, Miss., revealed his intentions to attend LSU at a restaurant on the Oxford Square, adjacent to the University of Mississippi campus.
Liggins had narrowed the field between LSU and Ole Miss, and anticipation about his decision grew to the point that the restaurant was filled two hours before he took the stage. The line outside the restaurant was 10 deep. So many pedestrians filled the square that two policemen were put on patrol – on horseback – even though Liggins’ announcement was scheduled to be aired live on local TV.
Personally? I’m from the Stone Age when it comes to recruiting: Sign the letter-of-intent in the school library or, better yet, the counselor’s office. Show some humility, and, please, put that tired three-hat skit to bed.
Practically? The idea of a nationally touted recruit signing a letter of intent in the school library is as passé as a touchdown acknowledged with a mere handshake.
Instead of wasting energy beating oars against the current, I’m on board with ESPN’s overkill. Turn recruiting into the equivalent of the NFL draft: Invite the top 100 prospects to a predetermined site for a signing-day extravaganza.
Slot it in prime time, coax extravagant fees from advertising sponsors, and funnel some of the revenue toward all those high-school athletic programs struggling to exist.
There’s no turning back to those fondly remembered days of college football recruiting, when some mope working the newspaper desk had first access to an entire class.
Better to move forward, and convert national signing day into the prime-time TV show it is screaming to be.
john.mcgrath@thenewstribune.com
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