Signing day and expectations
posted by LW, Wednesday, February 03, 2010
To a lot of folks out there, this is like Christmas morning.
To me, it's just another day.
Never been a huge fan of the recruiting game. My preference is to wait and see what they look like when they get to campus, and then form an opinion of who these guys are and what they should do.
That said, I'm not sure I understand how some folks think the obsession with recruiting is some sinister cancer that must be eradicated.
The acquisition of talent is far and away the most important element in football or whatever sport. So it makes some sense to follow that process -- particularly in a sport that's followed more rabidly than any other and only lasts three months.
Bart Wright typically gets on his anti-recruiting soapbox once every few months, and today he again climbs aboard while offering a dispatch from Marcus Lattimore's announcement in Spartanburg.
Look: I'll admit I wasn't 100 percent comfortable with all this fanfare occuring in a church, complete with that "Sandstorm" bit rattling the pews after Lattimore announced for South Carolina.
I'll also admit I'll never completely reconcile high school recruits who have yet to play a down of college football making such a spectacle of where they'll attend school -- and often dissing the schools that came in second for the kids' services.
But college football, which has always been a big deal (especially in the South), is a much bigger deal than it's ever been. And there are a lot of negative trappings that come with the elevated profile and higher stakes.
Isn't putting more than 90,000 fans in your stadium for a meaningless exercise like the spring game a bit strange? Alabama has done that, and will do it again this year.
Isn't it insane when a head coach makes $5 million a year? Used to be, $2 million was a gargantuan amount of money to pay a coach. Now, Mack Brown got a raise of $2 million after Texas secured a spot in the BCS title game.
How about the mushrooming salaries for assistant coaches? At the turn of the century, N.C. State's Chuck Amato made big headlines by making his coaches the first million-dollar staff. Now, some assistants are making a million by themselves.
How about an NCAA basketball tournament that takes kids away from class for weeks at a time?
How about the so-called "arms race," in which athletics departments go into debt building lavish new facilities to attract recruits?
How about the SEC's $3 billion television deal with ESPN and CBS, an agreement that threatens to make a second class of everyone else?
I could go on.
The point is, there's a lot of stuff in big-time college athletics that's not easily reconciled in the context of higher education. The obsession with recruiting is merely one item on a very long list.
Back to the specifics of Bart's column: I don't have big problems with his premise, but he seems to overreach in several cases.
Baseball may still be called the national pastime but football is the national obsession, the guilty pleasure we can’t let go.
How else to explain more than 100 adults showing up in one place to learn where a high school kid wants to go to college?
Not the next brain surgeon or the next one to try to cure cancer, not someone entering law school, or a brilliant student who can make the lessons of history come alive and have meaning in the real world for the next generation of students, we showed up because Marcus Lattimore was going to announce where he’d go to school to play football.
There's a bit of a conflict here, stemming from the fact that Bart happens to be a sportswriter. His business is writing about guys who play and coach games, not guys who are trying to cure cancer or trying to "make the lessons of history come alive." So he's part of this hype machine, albeit to a lesser degree.
It felt like the end of innocence for Lattimore, who has been a hometown football hero for a few years now, an object of excessive and unnecessary celebrity in the church he attends with a collection of media types and a production staged, according to handout, by EvVee Marketing, apparently a firm hired by someone to make a grand presentation.
When marketing firms are hired to help deliver the choice of college from a high school kids, something has gone wrong.
Can't disagree on the marketing thing. But Bart goes too far on the "end of innocence" thing.
There was a picture of Lattimore on the handout and words attributed to Nelson Mandela that said, in part, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous?”
Let’s hope that doesn’t get circulated among his future teammates at South Carolina, because it will be a whole new world for him in college as the home state hero with more expectations on his shoulders than anyone on the team. Derek Watson was once going to be the Gamecocks’ savior, and then there was Demetris Summers.
That the program is still a picture of mediocrity tells you how successful those two were at turning things around.
Fair point. Watson and Summers provided classic examples of what recruiting rankings and hype do not account for, and that's character. Both were problem kids, and neither completed his eligibility in Columbia.
I will point out, though, that Watson actually did play a significant role in the Gamecocks winning 17 games in 2000 and 2001. He didn't "turn the program" around, because their program slid back to mediocrity thereafter. But it's ignorant to suggest that a good bit of the hype that accompanied his signing with South Carolina was not legit.
In his haste to support his premise by recalling instances of busts (including Willy Korn), Bart ignores instances of the hype being justified.
Was it an "end of innocence" for C.J. Spiller when he shocked everyone by spurning home-state Florida and picking Clemson?
How about for Alshon Jeffery, who jilted Southern Cal while signing with the Gamecocks ... then proved every bit worth the hype in his freshman season?
Does the consumption with the NFL Draft contribute to a similar end of innocence for college kids who haven't done squat on an NFL field?
You're telling me Kentucky basketball fans weren't justified in going ga-ga over the addition of John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins?
Speaking of Spiller, his signing-day drama remains one of the memorable moments among coaches who were on Clemson's staff back then.
Twenty or thirty people crammed into the small office of Dabo Swinney, who was then Clemson's receivers coach and the man most responsible for Spiller's recruitment.
Listening to Spiller's announcement via radio, the folks in that office hung on every word as if it were the last minute of a tie football game. When he chose Clemson, the room erupted.
Until it stops being that important to the coaches doing the recruiting, it's going to be that important to fans who follow the recruiting -- and thus, to those of us whose business is largely tied to providing information about that recruiting.
The recruiting obsession might not be realistic or proportional or savory, but what part of big-time college football is?
Moving right along...
In The Post and Courier, Travis Sawchik says Clemson's class could use a shot of star power.
The second paragraph appears a bit dated:
On National Signing Day today, Clemson is hoping to make a similar splash by signing five-star Greensboro safety/receiver Keenan Allen. Allen is rated as the fifth overall prospect in the country by Rivals.com and 33rd by ESPN.
In The State/Spartanburg Herald-Journal, a piece on Darius Robinson.
Also in the Greenville News, Billy Napier talks about the recruiting process.
“Predicting whether or not a guy’s going to be successful is not science,” said offensive coordinator Billy Napier, who preceded Jeff Scott as Clemson recruiting coordinator. “You’ve got to be efficient. There are only so many hours in a day, so many days in a year. Fight the battles you think you can win. Don’t waste your time chasing a ghost.
“Sometimes I think we can get caught up in chasing guys we have no chance to get.”
In the Independent-Mail, Greg Wallace writes about the hard work Dabo Swinney's staff put into this class.
“The thing that stood out to me when I looked at the class was that so many kids in the class were committed a considerable amount of time,” said ESPN/Scouts Inc. national recruiting analyst Tom Luginbill. “That gives an indication of the strength not only of the school but what’s alluring about the school and the relationship established, which remains intact for a long period of time.
“Recruiting is a marathon, not a sprint. Until ink goes to paper, it can change in the blink of an eye. But we’ve seen that happen rarely, if at all, with Clemson.”
Also in the Independent-Mail, an update on Jake Nicolopulos.
In ACC basketball, it's hard to keep everyone happy while determining the TV schedule. J.P. Giglio of the Raleigh News & Observer has a good story on the issue.
"Turnaround" games, with only one day between games, lead the list of gripes among the coaches, from Duke's Mike Krzyzewski to Maryland's Gary Williams. But there are other quirks, such as the order of the conference games and open dates, which make life harder on Hicks and the ACC.
"We're doing the best we can do," Hicks said. "Without a true [round-robin] schedule, there are going to be problems."
Wake Forest battled itself as much as Miami in last night's win over the Hurricanes in Winston-Salem. Man, sloppy game.
Really looking forward to Boise State-Virginia Tech on Labor Day.
LW
Click here for the "Eye On The Tigers" blog archive.
Link to this entry - Discuss this entry - Return to Blog Home
To a lot of folks out there, this is like Christmas morning.
To me, it's just another day.
Never been a huge fan of the recruiting game. My preference is to wait and see what they look like when they get to campus, and then form an opinion of who these guys are and what they should do.
That said, I'm not sure I understand how some folks think the obsession with recruiting is some sinister cancer that must be eradicated.
The acquisition of talent is far and away the most important element in football or whatever sport. So it makes some sense to follow that process -- particularly in a sport that's followed more rabidly than any other and only lasts three months.
Bart Wright typically gets on his anti-recruiting soapbox once every few months, and today he again climbs aboard while offering a dispatch from Marcus Lattimore's announcement in Spartanburg.
Look: I'll admit I wasn't 100 percent comfortable with all this fanfare occuring in a church, complete with that "Sandstorm" bit rattling the pews after Lattimore announced for South Carolina.
I'll also admit I'll never completely reconcile high school recruits who have yet to play a down of college football making such a spectacle of where they'll attend school -- and often dissing the schools that came in second for the kids' services.
But college football, which has always been a big deal (especially in the South), is a much bigger deal than it's ever been. And there are a lot of negative trappings that come with the elevated profile and higher stakes.
Isn't putting more than 90,000 fans in your stadium for a meaningless exercise like the spring game a bit strange? Alabama has done that, and will do it again this year.
Isn't it insane when a head coach makes $5 million a year? Used to be, $2 million was a gargantuan amount of money to pay a coach. Now, Mack Brown got a raise of $2 million after Texas secured a spot in the BCS title game.
How about the mushrooming salaries for assistant coaches? At the turn of the century, N.C. State's Chuck Amato made big headlines by making his coaches the first million-dollar staff. Now, some assistants are making a million by themselves.
How about an NCAA basketball tournament that takes kids away from class for weeks at a time?
How about the so-called "arms race," in which athletics departments go into debt building lavish new facilities to attract recruits?
How about the SEC's $3 billion television deal with ESPN and CBS, an agreement that threatens to make a second class of everyone else?
I could go on.
The point is, there's a lot of stuff in big-time college athletics that's not easily reconciled in the context of higher education. The obsession with recruiting is merely one item on a very long list.
Back to the specifics of Bart's column: I don't have big problems with his premise, but he seems to overreach in several cases.
Baseball may still be called the national pastime but football is the national obsession, the guilty pleasure we can’t let go.
How else to explain more than 100 adults showing up in one place to learn where a high school kid wants to go to college?
Not the next brain surgeon or the next one to try to cure cancer, not someone entering law school, or a brilliant student who can make the lessons of history come alive and have meaning in the real world for the next generation of students, we showed up because Marcus Lattimore was going to announce where he’d go to school to play football.
There's a bit of a conflict here, stemming from the fact that Bart happens to be a sportswriter. His business is writing about guys who play and coach games, not guys who are trying to cure cancer or trying to "make the lessons of history come alive." So he's part of this hype machine, albeit to a lesser degree.
It felt like the end of innocence for Lattimore, who has been a hometown football hero for a few years now, an object of excessive and unnecessary celebrity in the church he attends with a collection of media types and a production staged, according to handout, by EvVee Marketing, apparently a firm hired by someone to make a grand presentation.
When marketing firms are hired to help deliver the choice of college from a high school kids, something has gone wrong.
Can't disagree on the marketing thing. But Bart goes too far on the "end of innocence" thing.
There was a picture of Lattimore on the handout and words attributed to Nelson Mandela that said, in part, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous?”
Let’s hope that doesn’t get circulated among his future teammates at South Carolina, because it will be a whole new world for him in college as the home state hero with more expectations on his shoulders than anyone on the team. Derek Watson was once going to be the Gamecocks’ savior, and then there was Demetris Summers.
That the program is still a picture of mediocrity tells you how successful those two were at turning things around.
Fair point. Watson and Summers provided classic examples of what recruiting rankings and hype do not account for, and that's character. Both were problem kids, and neither completed his eligibility in Columbia.
I will point out, though, that Watson actually did play a significant role in the Gamecocks winning 17 games in 2000 and 2001. He didn't "turn the program" around, because their program slid back to mediocrity thereafter. But it's ignorant to suggest that a good bit of the hype that accompanied his signing with South Carolina was not legit.
In his haste to support his premise by recalling instances of busts (including Willy Korn), Bart ignores instances of the hype being justified.
Was it an "end of innocence" for C.J. Spiller when he shocked everyone by spurning home-state Florida and picking Clemson?
How about for Alshon Jeffery, who jilted Southern Cal while signing with the Gamecocks ... then proved every bit worth the hype in his freshman season?
Does the consumption with the NFL Draft contribute to a similar end of innocence for college kids who haven't done squat on an NFL field?
You're telling me Kentucky basketball fans weren't justified in going ga-ga over the addition of John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins?
Speaking of Spiller, his signing-day drama remains one of the memorable moments among coaches who were on Clemson's staff back then.
Twenty or thirty people crammed into the small office of Dabo Swinney, who was then Clemson's receivers coach and the man most responsible for Spiller's recruitment.
Listening to Spiller's announcement via radio, the folks in that office hung on every word as if it were the last minute of a tie football game. When he chose Clemson, the room erupted.
Until it stops being that important to the coaches doing the recruiting, it's going to be that important to fans who follow the recruiting -- and thus, to those of us whose business is largely tied to providing information about that recruiting.
The recruiting obsession might not be realistic or proportional or savory, but what part of big-time college football is?
Moving right along...
In The Post and Courier, Travis Sawchik says Clemson's class could use a shot of star power.
The second paragraph appears a bit dated:
On National Signing Day today, Clemson is hoping to make a similar splash by signing five-star Greensboro safety/receiver Keenan Allen. Allen is rated as the fifth overall prospect in the country by Rivals.com and 33rd by ESPN.
In The State/Spartanburg Herald-Journal, a piece on Darius Robinson.
Also in the Greenville News, Billy Napier talks about the recruiting process.
“Predicting whether or not a guy’s going to be successful is not science,” said offensive coordinator Billy Napier, who preceded Jeff Scott as Clemson recruiting coordinator. “You’ve got to be efficient. There are only so many hours in a day, so many days in a year. Fight the battles you think you can win. Don’t waste your time chasing a ghost.
“Sometimes I think we can get caught up in chasing guys we have no chance to get.”
In the Independent-Mail, Greg Wallace writes about the hard work Dabo Swinney's staff put into this class.
“The thing that stood out to me when I looked at the class was that so many kids in the class were committed a considerable amount of time,” said ESPN/Scouts Inc. national recruiting analyst Tom Luginbill. “That gives an indication of the strength not only of the school but what’s alluring about the school and the relationship established, which remains intact for a long period of time.
“Recruiting is a marathon, not a sprint. Until ink goes to paper, it can change in the blink of an eye. But we’ve seen that happen rarely, if at all, with Clemson.”
Also in the Independent-Mail, an update on Jake Nicolopulos.
In ACC basketball, it's hard to keep everyone happy while determining the TV schedule. J.P. Giglio of the Raleigh News & Observer has a good story on the issue.
"Turnaround" games, with only one day between games, lead the list of gripes among the coaches, from Duke's Mike Krzyzewski to Maryland's Gary Williams. But there are other quirks, such as the order of the conference games and open dates, which make life harder on Hicks and the ACC.
"We're doing the best we can do," Hicks said. "Without a true [round-robin] schedule, there are going to be problems."
Wake Forest battled itself as much as Miami in last night's win over the Hurricanes in Winston-Salem. Man, sloppy game.
Really looking forward to Boise State-Virginia Tech on Labor Day.
LW
Click here for the "Eye On The Tigers" blog archive.
Link to this entry - Discuss this entry - Return to Blog Home
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