Fusco: Football fans get their fix from signing day

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

The sounds and smells of late September tailgates on the Hill have been exchanged for Allen Fieldhouse campouts. Kansas fans have turned their collective ire from Lee Corso to Digger Phelps. Memories of bowl season have been replaced with the anticipation of brackets full of March madness.

By all indications, it’s basketball season. But for those who insist on a February football fix, there’s signing day – the most overhyped and overanalyzed day of the college football calendar.

Photo by Jon Goering

File photo

When each team formally announces its 2008 recruiting class Wednesday, diehard fans won’t lack for knowledge of the high school seniors pledged to become Jayhawks, Wildcats, Sooners or other college teams. CSTV is planning seven hours of programming full of signing day information. ESPNU is devoting all of Wednesday afternoon to covering the commitments. And yes, some people care intensely. When I tried tracking down some further info on ESPNU’s recruiting info, its Web site read, “This site is temporarily too busy to process your request. Please try again later.”

Can’t log on over at ESPNU.com? No worries. Web destinations such as Rivals.com and Scout.com are devoted almost entirely to recruiting news – at this time of the year, mainly football. Rivals.com boasts message boards, national team recruiting rankings, lists of the top prospects at each position projected through 2011 and individual biographies of countless high school players.

This would all be great if the whole process wasn’t an educated guessing game at best and a crapshoot at worst. Recruiting services can’t possibly watch in person each and every high school player they “evaluate.” Web sites are notorious for granting players better rankings on the basis of which schools are interested. A glance through some players’ biographies would have you believe every kid in America runs no slower than a 4.55 second 40-yard dash and can bench press 325 pounds.

To see the guesswork and inaccuracy that goes into scouting the multitude of prep football prospects, one doesn’t have to look any farther than Kansas’ commit lists from the past few seasons. The Jayhawks’ 2004 class was a real bummer according to Rivals.com. Kansas didn’t snag any four-star recruits, out of a possible five stars. Of the 21-player class, 14 were two-star kids – players destined for mediocrity. Turns out the recruiting service was wrong because the 2004 class turned out to be more than average.

Junior Aqib Talib was one of those two-star recruits, and the cornerback is now headed for a gigantic pay day and the first round of the NFL Draft. Junior offensive lineman Anthony Collins was a two-star guy, too. He’s also headed to the NFL after an All-American season. Dexton Fields, junior wide receiver, who led Kansas with 63 receptions last year, earned just two stars. Junior Jayhawks’ tackling leader, Joe Mortensen, also got the two-star tag.

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Kansas Big 12 Conference recruiting rank (out of 12 teams):

2007: 9th

2006: 7th

2005: 10th

2004: 11th

2003: 7th

— Rivals.com

The 2007 Kansas Jayhawks managed to finish 12-1 and capture an Orange Bowl victory with no players Rivals.com deemed five-star prospects and just two four-star players – freshman wide receiver Ryan Murphy, who didn’t play a single down all season, and sophomore cornerback Anthony Webb, who became more famous for his refusal to call for a fair catch than for any of his positive attributes. That fact speaks more to the failure of the recruiting service than it does the quality of Kansas’ players, who were able to match up favorably across the board against the highly touted Virginia Tech Hokies in last month’s Orange Bowl triumph.

If you flip on the TV Wednesday afternoon or stumble onto some recruiting rankings in the paper later this week, remember to take everything you hear with a grain of salt. The too-small, too-slow, two-star player who goes unmentioned could be an eventual Orange Bowl MVP and the uber-prospect who earns five stars and endless accolades could end up an afterthought.

— Edited by Mandy Earles

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