Sign Language

At three minutes past five o'clock in the afternoon on Wednesday, Feb. 7, nearly 1,000 people rose from their seats as one and filled the LSU Field House with a primal cry. Marvin Dugas, a 46-year-old Tigers football booster from the tiny bayou town of Donner (pop. 296), a self-described "died-in-the-wool Cajun," had just shouted into a microphone, "Now, the man who is going to lead us to the promised land!" and football coach Gerry DiNardo strode to the front of the congregation. A chant was raucously joined. "L-S-U! L-S-U! L-S-U!"

Some of the fans had been in the building since 7:30 that morning, having driven through the predawn darkness to Baton Rouge from the farthest corners of Louisiana. They had paid $15 each to attend the Bayou Bash Recruiting Party, LSU's national signing day get-together; they, had eaten breakfast, lunch and dinner at long tables draped in purple beneath bouquets of gold and purple balloons; they had watched highlights of the Tigers' 1995 season on four oversized televisions and one towering screen. "To me, this extends the football season," said Don Tarver, 65, a retired Air Force fighter pilot who drove 170 miles from Jena, La. And as the day passed, the audience grew in size and diversity. Now among those chanting at DiNardo's arrival were LSU students and faculty members, the president of the state's university system and former governor John McKeithen. All of them, in a frenzy.

Finally, DiNardo asked for calm, and the crowd obediently took its seats. He stood before the boosters in a gray jacket and black slacks, silhouetted against a white screen. And in the fresh quiet, DiNardo began laying transparencies on the face of an overhead projector. The audience sat, rapt, as he spoke. The scene was surreal. It seemed as if an entire roomful of fans had lost their way to the football stadium and come upon a lecture hall. In search of Billy Cannon, they had found Carl Sagan.

Or had they? DiNardo's visual aids were a packet of one-page biographies on the 24 high school seniors and four junior college transfers who had signed national letters of intent to play football for LSU next fall. It wasn't a lecture at all; it was a revival meeting. As names of the Tigers' top recruits were projected on the screen, the audience peppered the coach with knowing bursts of applause. Cecil Collins, running back from Leesville, La.; Alcender Jackson, offensive lineman from Moss Point, Miss.; Derrion Yates, defensive end from Houston....

This was no mistake: One thousand people had gathered to cheer the signing of a football recruiting class in much the same way they would a victory over Auburn. Not one of the teenagers whose names were called had played a down of college football, yet their signings—hailed as LSU's best class in a decade—were as real a triumph as anything in autumn. "This is Louisiana," said Jerry Rousseau, a 57-year-old retired comptroller who spent his entire day in the field house. "We hunt, we fish, we tune into LSU recruiting. If you've never been in Tiger Stadium on a Saturday night in the fall, you wouldn't understand."

That's what this was, then. A Saturday night in October transplanted into February. Names for the future. A championship carved out of the hope that a promising boy of 17 will someday be a skilled man of 21. "I don't think this day can be overrated," said DiNardo. "It has an awful lot to do with our future."

Welcome to signing day, a yearly event that gives rise to some of the most arcane rituals in all of mainstream American sport. By tradition, signing day is the first Wednesday in February. It is also the first day of the eight-week period during which high school football recruits are eligible to sign letters of intent, binding them to a university for the coming fall and in return promising an athletic scholarship. Typically, the recruit and his parents or guardians sign his letter, fax it to the school and send two of the three original copies by mail. (The Collegiate Commissioners Association, which administers the letter-of-intent program, views a faxed copy as binding.) The vast majority of football recruits sign on the first day because they have long since grown weary of the recruiting process. In theory, it's all quite simple.

In practice, though, it isn't simple at all. It is the very best of high school athletes pledging their talents to colleges that have fought desperate battles for their services. It is college coaches seeing months of effort rewarded or spurned on the whims of youth. It is recruiting experts attaching rankings to the colleges' recruiting classes, numbers that can follow a coach like a bad investment for five years. "If someone writes that you had a recruiting class in the top 10," said UCLA assistant coach Gary Bernardi, "people are going to want to know why your team isn't in the top 10 [chart, left]."

LSU represents signing-day frenzy in the extreme—"A lot of places, you could have an event like this and nobody would show up," DiNardo said at the Bayou Bash—but the peculiar rhythm of the first Wednesday in February is scarcely limited to a single building or a single party or a single school.

It plays out in the weeks before signing day, when the phone lines at radio stations like WLAC in Nashville crackle with recruiting talk. Hosts Bill King and Bob Bell do a daily talk show from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., but limit recruiting calls—here, of course, the subject is usually the fortunes of SEC schools—to the last hour, because the topic would otherwise overwhelm their show. "Folks do try to slip 'em in earlier," says Bell. On the night before signing day, Bell and King hear callers from Dallas to Tampa to Flint, Mich., and in 60 minutes they discuss 62 prospects.