College football recruiting season in full swing

By By Stan Torgerson/guest columnist
February 22, 2004
By now this newspaper has dotted every i and crossed every recruiting t. I'm constantly surprised and a bit amazed at the importance given to signing day.
I'm not a cynic about recruiting and I do enjoy the chase as much as any fan. My problem is I've been around too long or at least long enough to be a realist. Nothing is truer than the observation, "You won't really know what you've got until four or five years from now." If half of the kids who signed with Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Southern Mississippi are around in their senior year the schools will have done well.
The pitfalls are obvious. Let's start with academics. They all signed some borderline students who just won't be able to find time for practice and learning the game while still finding some more for academics. It's tough to play major college sports and make the required progress toward a degree. The days of staying in school by taking classes in first aid, stagecraft, canoeing, public speaking and others while somehow dodging the foreign languages, history, English and algebra are over.
The school presidents have toughened the academic side and they're going to go farther in that direction. Yes, I concede athletes can get tutoring and yes, there is such a thing as athletic-minded friendly professors and yes, you can get by for one year by barely attending classes but for many of the boys who try that route it is back on the street again.
Then there's the injury factor. Check out the signing lists and see how many 250, 275 or 300 pounders are coming into the programs. When a 190 -pound running back runs into a 325-pound defensive lineman he can get hurt. Football is not a finesse game. It is a brutal one, man against man, muscle against muscle. It is not a sport for those who bruise easily.
Let's not forget the reality of college football. The bigger and stronger kid who in high school was knocking smaller people on their backsides now has to play against other bigger and stronger people who can do the same to him. Some of these youngsters are going to decide they don't like the game that much after all. I've seen it on the practice field many times. It isn't lack of courage. It has nothing to do with being "a real man." It's just reality setting in. Those other guys are too big, too strong or too fast and football isn't fun any more. They find an excuse and they leave.
Then there's the unspoken trap. Love. Some of these kids are going to fall in love and their glands will dominate their muscles. It's more fun to spend time with Mary Ellen than it is to spend it with their coaches. There will be a few of this year's signees who will marry by their junior or senior year and with marriage comes responsibilities more important than blocking or tackling other big sweaty men.
Think back to the signing classes of 1999 and 2000. Each school signed over 20 each of those two years or a total of about 45 scholarship players. Mississippi State finished the 2003 campaign with only 18 seniors. Ole Miss had 21. Where did the rest of them go? Read the above again.
But here's where we may rub a few feathers. I've read the biographies of each player signed by our three Division I schools and read them carefully. I have no doubt that some, or hopefully, all of them, have outstanding ability.
But I feel about these recruiting "experts" whose opinions are quoted so often the way I feel about the preseason magazines which allegedly can tell you how good your favorite team will be and what kind of year they will have. Crystal balls don't work.
One school in another SEC state put out a press release that a kid they had signed was rated the 43rd best running back in the country. Come on. Are you kidding? How would anyone sitting in his office, reading various newspapers and the statistics, making phone calls and even watching some film possibly decide this kid from another state is the 43rd best high school running back in the U.S. And what would it mean if he was?
To me vital statistics height, weight and speed are important, but playing statistics can be doubted. How do you trust numbers compiled by a high school 10th grader walking along the sideline with a clip board under his arm? Colleges use teams of people to keep stats and still sometimes get them wrong.
I can accept opinions but only opinions from home state writers who know the game and whom I've learned to trust over the years. But recruiting experts who make their living telling people what they want to hear carry very little weight with me. Have you ever read an article by one who said such and such a school had a rotten recruiting year? It doesn't happen.
Every coach knows, and I know, that if he loses more than he wins next fall there will be fans who will say "it must be the coach's fault because all the experts said we had a great recruiting year."
Did our Mississippi schools really have great recruiting years? Come back in 2007 and ask me again.