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Recruiting rankings are meaningless
Wednesday is the beginning of college football's signing period. For the uninitiated, that's when college football fans rise to celebrate a teenager's signature on a sheet of paper. It is the first day high school seniors are eligible to sign national letters-of-intent which declare the colleges they will attend. In many parts of the country, it is a bigger day than any Saturday in autumn. A signing day story: On the first Wednesday of February 1996, I spent the day on the LSU campus. At the time, signing day was attended by a full-on, day-long party in a field house, with hundreds of fans in attendance. The cavernous room was decorated in blue and yellow balloons and streamers, as if somebody's senior prom was taking place. Late in the afternoon, coach Gerry DiNardo took hold of a microphone and read biographies of the 25 Tigers recruits, each to thunderous applause. There had been many LSU football games in the previous decade -- and would be many more in the ensuing four years, it turns out -- that produced less excitement. Did the people in that building really believe that LSU had won something simply by convincing some supposedly good players to attend their school? Oh, you bet they did. I have a couple of theories on this. First, competition is competition. If Michigan State can beat Michigan for a big-time recruit from Grand Rapids, that's a win. Period. So recruiting is a game, too. Second, the fans who put as much effort into recruiting (or the NFL draft, for that matter) are the same fans who think that rotisserie leagues are tantamount to the real thing, without the physical conditioning. In other words, a Florida fan can only do so much on Saturday. He can dress up in orange and blue, get drunk and scream, "Kiss my butt, Fulmer !" but that's about it. What happens on the field is out of his control. Recruiting is another story. It isn't really a game at all. It's a dirty, demeaning process in which grown men try to convince pampered, overpublicized high school athletes that their school is better than any other, when, in fact, the coach's only real concern is whether that kid can bench a Volvo. But it isn't a game, and it has no real outcome that can be tangibly measured. It's words and numbers and maybes and possiblys. Therefore, recruiting fans feel like they can be part of the process. They can project potential as well as the next guy. So they dive in. Another signing day story: Over the weekend, I talked to a kid named Robert Bergman, a 6-foot-5, 275-pound offensive tackle from Bakersfield, Calif., who says he will sign Wednesday with Miami. Bergman waffled on his choice when Butch Davis bolted for the NFL's Cleveland Browns last Monday. On the day of Davis' announcement, Bergman's phone started ringing in mid-morning and never stopped. Bergman and his mother went out for the evening just to get away from it. When they got home, there were 43 messages waiting. That's what recruiting is like. It's a desperate business. Most good college coaches can look at high school players -- in person and on tape -- and tell you who's good and who isn't. The hard part is telling you which ones will get better and which ones won't. And they all have to get better to be effective college players (just like college studs have to get better to play in the NFL). Who can carry 50 more pounds and not slow down? Who has weak knees and ankles that won't handle the heavier hitting? Who won't have the stomach for the competition? If only the coaches knew. This is why signing day is such a hollow event. Sure, you can rank the schools, cataloging which ones snagged the most blue-chip players. But it doesn't mean a thing. Even the recruiting analysts who make their living ranking classes will tell you it's all fools' gold. Back on that February day in '96, most experts agreed that DiNardo had landed one of the best classes in the country, making inroads into parts of the South that LSU hadn't touched in years. Turns out it was a good enough class to get DiNardo fired (with plenty of help from DiNardo himself). Now, word is that new LSU coach Nick Saban is about to sign a great class. Talk to me in four years. Until then, I don't want to hear about it. Sports Illustrated senior writer Tim Layden covers college football for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com. Click here to send him a comment.
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