No beacon of hope quite matches the great national fascination with football recruiting.
We tend to think of college football coaches as strong-willed, principled men — many of them are. But it’s interesting to see how some of them seem to melt for an 18-year-old who runs 40 yards in 4.4 seconds and can bench-press 350 pounds.
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A lot of people — including both college football insiders and outsiders — hold a dear perception that winning starts with that special kind of talent. Most of the time, you don’t even need the measurements or statistics. I cover high school sports — most of the time, you can just see it on the field.
It’s true that you need some big bricks to build a foundation of any program, but what are those cornerstones?
Is it coaching? Is it athletic tradition? Is it facilities?
More and more, people believe it has to do with how many stars are next to someone’s name on a website somewhere.
I’m not against signing day ceremonies — let me just make that clear. Signing a letter of intent for a college scholarship is any athlete’s dream, and an event worth celebrating. It’s a culmination of a lot of hard work that maybe no one else will ever understand. One of the saddest things about this year’s signing day in Utah is football recruits won’t get together at Rice-Eccles Stadium.
Players dress up in suits, parents beam with pride, and with a flourish of a pen, the athletes set their futures. But at times, the hype around the top-level recruits is so great and so deafening, we tend to overlook or even celebrate the more garish spectacles.
I’m not just talking about the "hat selection" ritual that has become so popular. That’s relatively tame compared with when Isaiah Crowell used a live bulldog puppy as a prop to announce his commitment to Georgia.
Recruiting is such serious business nowadays that it can suck the joy out of what should be one of the happiest days of an athlete’s life. No matter what choice Landon Collins made, it was a given he was going to one of the top college football programs in the country. But when he chose Alabama over hometown LSU, his mother made a nationally televised stink about his snub of the Tigers.
There’s even evidence that the recruits themselves can’t handle the pressure. Take Cyrus Kouandjio, who announced his commitment to Auburn with all the joy of a man who got fruitcake for Christmas. On Signing Day, he never faxed in his letter of intent, then a few days later signed with Alabama.
A lot of people could jump to the conclusion that this a media-fueled trend. Perhaps in part — maybe even I’m guilty — but often the media of our times merely reflect what people want to consume. And right now, there’s a frenzy to eat up recruiting news and events.
It seems that so much of the time, when we see these athletes preparing to sign with our schools, we unfairly make them the vessels of our weighty hopes. We pour our hopes for big wins, Heismans and national titles into these teenage boys, who are often simply happy to be playing the game they love and to be going to college.
Sure, it’s OK to be a bit intoxicated by the allure of the future and the possibilities of what may be. But perhaps this Signing Day (Feb. 1), as you weigh what that four- or five-star recruit could do when he gets to your campus, give some equal time to the thought that this is still a kid. He needs time, and we all need patience.
After all, it doesn’t matter how many hats he has in front of him — it’s just a few months before he’s just another freshman.
kgoon@sltrib.comTwitter: @kylegoon
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