FOOTBALL LIT

Bruce Feldman’s post about Notre Dame recruiting reiterates a point that I noted yesterday in my post about Stewart Mandel’s book, Bowls, Polls & Tattered Souls.

And that point is: Prominent teams land highly ranked recruiting classes in part because they are expected to pursue only top recruits.  Here’s Feldman’s quote (emphasis added by me):

And yes, I know the Irish always seem to do well in recruiting. One reason why is any time the Irish pursue a prospect, his stock tends to go up in the recruiting analysts’ eyes. And yes, I also know that Charlie Weis signed a bunch of supposed top-10 recruiting classes that didn’t really pan out.

Despite this graf, Feldman believes that ND will land a truly stellar class this year (and that Brian Kelly will prove to be a better talent-developer than Charlie Weis).

Feldman wrote Meat Market: Inside the Smash-Mouth World of College Football Recruiting, the book that gave me the idea of writing a book about Hargrave Military Academy.  I’ll review Meat Market soon.

Fifteen days until National Signing Day 2011 – as good a time as any to review the recruiting chapter in Bowls, Polls & Tattered Souls, Stewart Mandel’s 2007 book about college football’s numerous controversies.

As Mandel points out, recruiting is all about hope for the future, and a massive media industry has sprung up around this emotion.  Local newspapers used to print Signing Day stories “somewhere between an annual charity golf tournament and an area resident bowling a 300 game.”  Now, fans take off work on Signing Day (some even tailgate), and hundreds of thousands follow every potential commit’s moves on Rivals.com or Scout.com.

There’s simply no way to scientifically cull through thousands of high school players and accurately project their futures.  It’s hard enough for the Internet recruiting services to accurately report the news about players commits and decommits, so they rely on representatives who run the fan sites within their networks to interview the players and report their latest moves.  Needless to say, these are fans, not journalists, and problems arise.

Mandel makes some interesting points about the foolishness of basing a player’s potential on the number of stars attached to his name or pinning your hopes on the ranking of your team’s recruiting class.  For one thing, a player’s stock rises and falls in part according to which team is pursuing him.

For instance, say you’re a recruiting analyst, and say the Florida receivers coach tells you that the Gators are going after receivers X, Y, and Z.  Seeing that Florida pretty much has its pick of the litter when it comes to receivers, you  might reasonably conclude that the Gators’ staff feels that X, Y, and Z are among the very best in the country and therefore your own rankings should probably reflect that.  So you rank all three among the top 10 in the country, and come February, when the Gators wind up landing two of the three, it reflects well on their overall signing class.  In the meantime, however, Rutgers may have found a stud receiver of its own, receiver W, who’s just as good as X, Y, and Z.  But because he wasn’t on Florida’s board, he isn’t taken as seriously, and, in turn, Rutgers’s class doesn’t get the same kind of boost.

Mandel says the fans and recruiting services are solely focused on the future, so he takes time in the chapter to evaluate the past, namely an update on the most recent (at the time the book was published) class to have completed its college eligibility.  Mandel took SuperPrep’s top 25 prospects from the high school class of 2002 and divided them into three categories: “superstars,” “starters” and “busts.”  Mandel believes that four members of that group (including Vince Young) could be classified as superstars, 15 as starters, and six (including Marcus Vick) as busts. 

Given all the potential pitfalls that can derail a college football player’s career, that actually sounds like a decent record of prognostication to me.