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6/10 Roundtable - The Hype Around Recruiting
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CollegeFootballNews.com
Posted Jun 10, 2009
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Has Signing Day crossed the line and become too hyped, or is the hoopla a necessary evil? It's the Wednesday topic in the CFN Daily Roundtable Discussion.
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CFN Daily Roundtables
 June
10
Has Recruiting Crossed A Line?
Over the next several weeks, as part of the CFN 2009 Preview, we'll
examine some of the key questions going into the year with a
daily discussion of the big topics.
Pete
Fiutak,
CFN
Yes, I'm part of
the problem. You can check me out at
twitter.com/CFN_Fiu and find
out future roundtable topics and other random musings.
Q:
Has Signing Day crossed
the line and become too hyped, or is the hoopla a necessary evil?
A:
Signing Day isn't evil; the hypocrisy of the recruiting process is.
Signing Day is goofy fun and gives fans something to get fired up
about in early February. If a kid wants to milk his moment in the
spotlight and a bunch of goofy adults want to hang on his every word,
fine, but there's always a point during the recruitpalooza that I have
to get up from my desk, break something tasteful, and then see if I can
find a Tyra rerun after hearing coach after coach chirp about
how it's all about the students who chose to join their respective
universities for their academic pursuits. No coach cares one ounce of
horsespit about how that No. 5 ranked running back did in physics or
what he's going to do in his General Studies courses, and the process to
get the kids to put on the hat is as corrupt as a senior official in the
Karzai regime.
My problem isn't with recruiting and the
"cheating" that goes on (and I put the word in quotes only because it's
cheating according to the self-serving, hypocritical rules put together
by the NCAA), my problem is that Signing Day basically celebrates the
programs that were the most, uh, um, persuasive, and it's done under the
guise of being noble.
We're all adults here, except for the
children who sign on the dotted line to make billions for the schools
and the NCAA and don't get fairly compensated, but that's for another
day. When you're looking at the rankings of the teams and how they did
after recruiting season, you have to view them like you would a list of
the 1998 home run leaders or when an NFL player has magical healing
powers and comes back from a serious injury to play the week after. It's
up to you whether or not you want to turn a blind eye to the process,
but don't bury your head in the sand and pretend it's nighttime.
Signing Day isn't about school or academics or the moment when young
men decide where to prepare themselves for the future. It's about
football players and football only. Period. If you want to look at all
the hoopla and all the hype as far as how the college football world
will be affected, that's fine. It is a necessary evil because it's
focusing on what teams got better and how the landscape of the sport is
going to change and look over the following seasons. But that's where it
stops.
At least college football recruiting isn't the complete
and utter slimefest that college basketball recruiting is (how's that
degree from Memphis looking now?), but the process just begs to be
abused and it has to be changed. 1) The rules are bizarre and no one
really knows what they are; 2) no one really adheres to them; 3) the
NCAA doesn't really care if no one follows them, just take a gander at
what's going on at Tennessee; and 4) the alternative isn't that bad and
it really wouldn't change anything.
I'd like Signing Day far
more if it was handled like a free agency signing period. Throw out all
the rules. If booster clubs want to pool their money and their cars and
their chicks to try to buy the best players, there's not only nothing
wrong with that, BUT IT'S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW ANYWAY. College football
is not an amateur sport; it's a multi-billion dollar business and it's
time everyone grew up and realized that saying that isn't a negative.
So over the next eight months as all the top high school seniors
continued to be fawned over, please try to take it all with a few dozen
grains of salt.
Richard
Cirminiello,
CFN
Q:
Has Signing Day crossed
the line and become too hyped, or is the hoopla a necessary evil?
A:
I get it, but I don’t quite get it.
Listen, I understand the
excitement for fans leading up to signing day. This is your NFL Draft, a
chance to celebrate the next generation of Tigers or Sooners or
Buckeyes. It’s fun, and if you bleed (fill in the appropriate colors),
then you should know who’s about to enter the farm system. However, I do
believe that the hysteria surrounding recruiting and signing day has
crossed the line of common sense. There’s just way too much attention
given to way too many kids, many of whom are not benefiting from the
media crush. And since way too many of these athletes won’t live up to
all of the attention, I prefer to wait a couple of years before
immersing myself in their bios.
Last year’s Bryce Brown saga was
sort of the tipping point for me. Limitless upside, I know, but
something is out of whack when high school football players have
managers and are being followed by paparazzi. Call me an alarmist,
but that’s got to be one of the signs of an athletics version of the
apocalypse.
Hey, have all the fun you want. Celebrate your
school’s recruiting class. Have a signing day party for all I care. Just
spare me some of the media attention and the fixation on these young
kids. If I never see another 18-year old playing the old school hat
shell game on television, I’ll chalk it up as a victory.
Matthew
Zemek, CFN
Q:
Has Signing Day crossed
the line and become too hyped, or is the hoopla a necessary evil?
A:
I don't know (and can't claim to know) exactly when or where or how the
threshold was crossed. What I can say is that it has been crossed. This
is part of the ugly underbelly of big-time college sports. The less
publicity attached to Signing Day and the recruiting game, the better
for everyone involved... including fans who should just wait until
spring ball and, even better, Labor Day weekend.
Jon Miller,
Publisher, HawkeyeNation.com
Q:
Has Signing Day crossed the line and become too hyped, or is the hoopla a necessary evil?
A:
I don’t think any evil is necessary, and yes, I think signing day is
overhyped. It’s really anticlimactic in this day and age. Most of the
hay is in the barn by signing day, so to speak. There are a few last
second decisions and more than a few 11th hour poachings that take
place, but other than that, you pretty much know what the recruiting
class of your favorite school looks like on signing day.
Personally, I think far too much is made of what Johnny Recruit is going
to do, period. A few updates during the year is good, but scores of
phone calls to these kids by scores of website publishers, network
scouts and now the newspaper writers seems silly to me. A three star
prospect that has offers from say five BCS conference schools is likely
to get 100 phone calls in a year from various writers and asked mostly
mundane questions about 40 times, college lists, favorites, bench press
numbers and when he is making a decision. Recruiting is entertaining,
but it has become a cottage industry that is a little bit out of control.
Hunter Ansley,
Publisher,
DraftZoo.com
Q:
Has Signing Day crossed the line and become too hyped, or is the hoopla a necessary evil?
A: It has gone too far.
These are 18 year old kids who haven’t done a thing in college
yet, and they’re being hailed on ESPN as gods.
Anytime a kid who plays a team sport seems so determined to bathe
in the spotlight as an individual you’re going to have a problem.
Look at Ryan Perriloux:
all-world recruit makes a big deal of his signing with LSU after
he had already snubbed Texas, who really came out ahead on that deal.
But then he gets to school and the first thing he does is point
his bat to the stands and proclaim that he’s going to bring home a
Heisman. Sorry, Ryan, they
don’t give the Heisman to Jacksonville State quarterbacks.
But that’s what the new atmosphere of signing day is breeding.
We’re getting athletes who are becoming prima donnas at an
accelerated stage. Perriloux
was so full of himself by the time he got to LSU that he was bound to
break the rules that he obviously didn’t feel applied to him.
Of
course, it’s not all the fault of the athletes.
These kids are coming from playing in front of 2,000 fans in
Podunk, Kentucky and all of the sudden their name is a top search on
Google. With the “advances” from
sites like YouTube, these kids are laptop-screen stars before they’ve
ever donned a uniform that wasn’t sewn by a teammate’s mom. So as long
as “recruiting bashes” are big-time social events on college campuses
(though they are fun) that bring in more money than most basketball
games, this is just something we’re all going to have to deal with.
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