Internet Recruiting
Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2005 8:31 pmIt's getting harder for recruits, coaches to untangle the Web
BY BRIAN CHRISTOPHERSON / Lincoln Journal Star
August 14, 2005
Friends are always calling when you can squat 365, bench 270 and jump 43 inches. Friends you didn't even know you had are calling.
Shareece Wright knows this.
He has plenty of friends these days.
He's never met some of them. Still, they light up his phone with an array of area codes to say hi, and to see if — just maybe — the California prep cornerback has decided to come play football at a college near them.
Why, it was just the other day when his friends at RealDawg.com, a recruiting Web site devoted to the Washington Huskies, called him.
"They tell me that I'll like Washington a lot," said Wright, who has been offered a scholarship by Nebraska and 10 other schools.
"They just let me know what's up and everything. They pretty much represent the school."
Wright thinks it's all pretty cool. Many college coaches do not.
Though somewhat absurd, it's one matter that the Internet "recruiting gurus" gossip about 16- and 17-year-olds as though these boys can summon fire from their fingertips. It's quite another if, under the title of reporter, Web workers are trying to recruit prep stars to come to the college down the street from them.
While Husker head coach Bill Callahan said he doesn't have time to pay attention to the Web site insanity, there are other coaches around the country alarmed by the dangerous influence Internet writers are wielding.
"It is the worst problem to hit college football in my lifetime," an ACC coach said in a July ESPN the Magazine story.
Said Nebraska offensive coordinator Jay Norvell: "It's out of control. … The problem is you got kids who are 16, 17 and 18 getting more exposure at an early age, and there's not always a lot of credibility from where it's coming from on the Internet."
Big Ten Conference coaches even spent some of their annual meetings this year discussing the troubling phenomenon.
Of the 13 players interviewed for this story, seven said at least one Web reporter had tried to influence them to a certain school during the recruiting process.
Said Husker commit Josh Freeman: "They would say stuff about their school, like, ‘Hey, you should really be going to Michigan. It'd be great. It'd be a perfect fit for you.' They say this when they don't know really anything about me."
Said fellow NU commit Menelik Holt: "The San Diego State (Web reporter) was a roommate with one of my coaches. That guy always tried to convince me to come to San Diego State."
Said Lincoln North Star senior Derrick Russell: "One guy was talking to me from a K-State Web site … He was telling me how nice it was down there and how the things were going for the football team. It was one of those things where you could tell he was kind of trying to persuade me."
Said Russell's North Star teammate, Tyler Bullock: "It's kind of weird. It's like they know what they're doing, but they don't want to admit what they're doing."
Said Husker linebacker Steve Octavien, a product of the most recent recruiting circus: "I hate to put Iowa out there. But yeah, you could tell with this one guy. He was always like, ‘Yeah, I'm with Iowa,' and then he'd try to find out stuff with leading questions, kind of trying to pitch where he was from."
The Iowa Rivals site said it had just one brief discussion with Octavien and there was no sales pitch for the university going on. That doesn't mean Octavien's story didn't happen. The conversation could have occurred with someone from Iowa's Scout site.
Most Division I teams are covered by Rivals.com and Scout.com, the two predominant Web sites when it comes to college football recruiting.
When a player is being pursued by a university, he can expect to get a call from both sites that cover that particular school. The two such sites concerning Nebraska football are huskersillustrated.com (Rivals) and bigredreport.com (Scout).
"If it came out you were interested in Michigan, you'd get a call from both (Michigan Web sites) the next day," Holt said.
And the questions that came from these Web reporters?
Almost always the same, Holt said.
" ‘What's your top five?' ‘What's your strengths as a player?' They always ask that one. ‘Have you been to any camps?' "
Sometimes, players' answers are not fresh enough.
So Web writers, in the pursuit to give their readers some meat, will try to make a story out of nothing, Freeman said.
He was particularly disturbed with one Web reporter from Nebraska who was very good in this regard.
"If I would say something like I liked another team's style to a question, he'd make a big story of it and say Josh Freeman is not 100 percent sure about Nebraska even when I was," he said.
Prep stars really knew it was crunch time in the recruiting process when their cell phones never stopped vibrating. Most of the time it wasn't coaches, or newspaper or magazine writers. It was guys from the Internet.
Freeman estimated 80 percent of the calls he received during the process were from Internet reporters.
"The Web guys would give you the check-up phone calls," said NU freshman quarterback Harrison Beck. "There were two different kind of check-up calls.
"There's the ‘Hey, I want to shoot the bull with you a little bit.' And there's the, ‘Are you still going to Nebraska right now because I heard a rumor,' phone call."
Husker freshman Barry Turner said there was one horrific week when he received between 75 and 100 calls.
While Turner initially enjoyed the fanfare, it got to be cumbersome after … well, about a month.
"I had to turn off my phone," he said.
There are more than 140,000 people in this country who pay the $9.95 a month to get "insider" information on the Rivals Web sites.
Bobby Burton, Rivals general manager, said his site generated 37 million page hits on the last signing day. Scout, which also charges the same monthly fee for "premium" information, reported to have 50 million page hits on that same day.
Rivals — which was formed in 2001 and now employs about 200 writers across the country — is said by Burton to be the "stickiest" sports content site on the Internet.
That means once people click on the Rivals site it takes them a long time to get off it. They stay at the site longer than people stay on even espn.com or cbssportsline.com.
"I think it's great for college football," said Burton, who believes recruiting Web sites help police the process.
"I'll never forget when I covered recruiting, I called three kids in a single night who had all been told by a Michigan coach that they were going to be the next Charles Woodson. …
"When I put it on the Internet, I got a call an hour later from a Michigan coach saying, ‘You're hurting us.' I said, ‘I was just reporting …' It used to be where college coaches could tell white lies like that to recruits until the cows came home."
As to the idea that his writers are trying to entice players in interviews to come to certain schools? Burton said that would be news to him.
"We don't hire fans. I will just be blunt," he said. "We hire people committed to being journalists, not fans. We have several measures that we do to make sure that any risk of that is mitigated. We have a code of ethics, editors and feet on the street. … We try to be a watchdog of ourselves."
Freeman said he felt the Rivals writers were much better than the Scout writers about leaving their opinions out of conversations.
While both Michigan and Oregon Scout writers tried to sell their universities to him, Freeman said "Rivals was more worried about my opinion than their own."
Asked if it bothered him when Web workers tried to recruit him to their universities, Freeman said: "I don't know if it's any different than meeting an alumni person around town, getting in a casual conversation and having them try to sway you to their school."
There is a difference, though. Web writers sit in the same press box that newspaper writers do during games.
Before each game, no matter what press box you're in, there is often an announcement made over the loud speaker that applies not just to that game but also to the primary rule of journalism:
"We ask for no cheering in the press box, please."
BY BRIAN CHRISTOPHERSON / Lincoln Journal Star
August 14, 2005
Friends are always calling when you can squat 365, bench 270 and jump 43 inches. Friends you didn't even know you had are calling.
Shareece Wright knows this.
He has plenty of friends these days.
He's never met some of them. Still, they light up his phone with an array of area codes to say hi, and to see if — just maybe — the California prep cornerback has decided to come play football at a college near them.
Why, it was just the other day when his friends at RealDawg.com, a recruiting Web site devoted to the Washington Huskies, called him.
"They tell me that I'll like Washington a lot," said Wright, who has been offered a scholarship by Nebraska and 10 other schools.
"They just let me know what's up and everything. They pretty much represent the school."
Wright thinks it's all pretty cool. Many college coaches do not.
Though somewhat absurd, it's one matter that the Internet "recruiting gurus" gossip about 16- and 17-year-olds as though these boys can summon fire from their fingertips. It's quite another if, under the title of reporter, Web workers are trying to recruit prep stars to come to the college down the street from them.
While Husker head coach Bill Callahan said he doesn't have time to pay attention to the Web site insanity, there are other coaches around the country alarmed by the dangerous influence Internet writers are wielding.
"It is the worst problem to hit college football in my lifetime," an ACC coach said in a July ESPN the Magazine story.
Said Nebraska offensive coordinator Jay Norvell: "It's out of control. … The problem is you got kids who are 16, 17 and 18 getting more exposure at an early age, and there's not always a lot of credibility from where it's coming from on the Internet."
Big Ten Conference coaches even spent some of their annual meetings this year discussing the troubling phenomenon.
Of the 13 players interviewed for this story, seven said at least one Web reporter had tried to influence them to a certain school during the recruiting process.
Said Husker commit Josh Freeman: "They would say stuff about their school, like, ‘Hey, you should really be going to Michigan. It'd be great. It'd be a perfect fit for you.' They say this when they don't know really anything about me."
Said fellow NU commit Menelik Holt: "The San Diego State (Web reporter) was a roommate with one of my coaches. That guy always tried to convince me to come to San Diego State."
Said Lincoln North Star senior Derrick Russell: "One guy was talking to me from a K-State Web site … He was telling me how nice it was down there and how the things were going for the football team. It was one of those things where you could tell he was kind of trying to persuade me."
Said Russell's North Star teammate, Tyler Bullock: "It's kind of weird. It's like they know what they're doing, but they don't want to admit what they're doing."
Said Husker linebacker Steve Octavien, a product of the most recent recruiting circus: "I hate to put Iowa out there. But yeah, you could tell with this one guy. He was always like, ‘Yeah, I'm with Iowa,' and then he'd try to find out stuff with leading questions, kind of trying to pitch where he was from."
The Iowa Rivals site said it had just one brief discussion with Octavien and there was no sales pitch for the university going on. That doesn't mean Octavien's story didn't happen. The conversation could have occurred with someone from Iowa's Scout site.
Most Division I teams are covered by Rivals.com and Scout.com, the two predominant Web sites when it comes to college football recruiting.
When a player is being pursued by a university, he can expect to get a call from both sites that cover that particular school. The two such sites concerning Nebraska football are huskersillustrated.com (Rivals) and bigredreport.com (Scout).
"If it came out you were interested in Michigan, you'd get a call from both (Michigan Web sites) the next day," Holt said.
And the questions that came from these Web reporters?
Almost always the same, Holt said.
" ‘What's your top five?' ‘What's your strengths as a player?' They always ask that one. ‘Have you been to any camps?' "
Sometimes, players' answers are not fresh enough.
So Web writers, in the pursuit to give their readers some meat, will try to make a story out of nothing, Freeman said.
He was particularly disturbed with one Web reporter from Nebraska who was very good in this regard.
"If I would say something like I liked another team's style to a question, he'd make a big story of it and say Josh Freeman is not 100 percent sure about Nebraska even when I was," he said.
Prep stars really knew it was crunch time in the recruiting process when their cell phones never stopped vibrating. Most of the time it wasn't coaches, or newspaper or magazine writers. It was guys from the Internet.
Freeman estimated 80 percent of the calls he received during the process were from Internet reporters.
"The Web guys would give you the check-up phone calls," said NU freshman quarterback Harrison Beck. "There were two different kind of check-up calls.
"There's the ‘Hey, I want to shoot the bull with you a little bit.' And there's the, ‘Are you still going to Nebraska right now because I heard a rumor,' phone call."
Husker freshman Barry Turner said there was one horrific week when he received between 75 and 100 calls.
While Turner initially enjoyed the fanfare, it got to be cumbersome after … well, about a month.
"I had to turn off my phone," he said.
There are more than 140,000 people in this country who pay the $9.95 a month to get "insider" information on the Rivals Web sites.
Bobby Burton, Rivals general manager, said his site generated 37 million page hits on the last signing day. Scout, which also charges the same monthly fee for "premium" information, reported to have 50 million page hits on that same day.
Rivals — which was formed in 2001 and now employs about 200 writers across the country — is said by Burton to be the "stickiest" sports content site on the Internet.
That means once people click on the Rivals site it takes them a long time to get off it. They stay at the site longer than people stay on even espn.com or cbssportsline.com.
"I think it's great for college football," said Burton, who believes recruiting Web sites help police the process.
"I'll never forget when I covered recruiting, I called three kids in a single night who had all been told by a Michigan coach that they were going to be the next Charles Woodson. …
"When I put it on the Internet, I got a call an hour later from a Michigan coach saying, ‘You're hurting us.' I said, ‘I was just reporting …' It used to be where college coaches could tell white lies like that to recruits until the cows came home."
As to the idea that his writers are trying to entice players in interviews to come to certain schools? Burton said that would be news to him.
"We don't hire fans. I will just be blunt," he said. "We hire people committed to being journalists, not fans. We have several measures that we do to make sure that any risk of that is mitigated. We have a code of ethics, editors and feet on the street. … We try to be a watchdog of ourselves."
Freeman said he felt the Rivals writers were much better than the Scout writers about leaving their opinions out of conversations.
While both Michigan and Oregon Scout writers tried to sell their universities to him, Freeman said "Rivals was more worried about my opinion than their own."
Asked if it bothered him when Web workers tried to recruit him to their universities, Freeman said: "I don't know if it's any different than meeting an alumni person around town, getting in a casual conversation and having them try to sway you to their school."
There is a difference, though. Web writers sit in the same press box that newspaper writers do during games.
Before each game, no matter what press box you're in, there is often an announcement made over the loud speaker that applies not just to that game but also to the primary rule of journalism:
"We ask for no cheering in the press box, please."