Everyone looks good on signing day.
Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2008 6:56 pmESPN the Magazine
Everyone looks good on signing day. It's the worst kind of tease.
by Bruce Feldman
Settle down, Buckeyes and Michigandersâ€â€and everyone else in the Terrelle Pryor lottery. Sure, he might emerge as the next Vince Young. But he could just as easily be another Xavier Lee.
Yeah, whatever happened to that guy? Four years ago, he was the coveted five-star player who was hailed as the next all-world, do-everything QB. He was the guy who was going to get Florida State back into the BCS picture, a prodigy who could zing the ball 60 yards from his knees and run over D-backs and past linebackers. Seminoles fans dubbed him Xavier the Savior. Trouble was, when he got to FSU, as great as he looked in workouts, he was that mediocre in games. His lasers often whizzed over receivers' heads or, worse, right to the other team. Reading D's was all of a sudden a little trickier for him than it had been at Seabreeze High in Daytona. Lee was 2–2 in the games in which he played last season, before he opted to take his chances in the NFL draft after his coaches tried to convince him to move to tight end.
Lost in all the mayhem of national Signing Day, the newest football holiday, is the fact that there are almost as many misses as hits when it comes to can't-miss kids. That's because football recruits are a lot harder to project than their counterparts in basketball, where coaches have the opportunity to see the best 500 prospects compete head-to-head in AAU and on the sneaker-camp circuit. In football, the camps and combines are relegated primarily to shorts-and-T-shirt workouts, in which kids do drills and run 40s. What they don't do is play football.
To make evaluating even trickier, coaches are put in the position of having to project where a young athlete will play. Maybe that high school QB will make a good cornerback. Maybe that running back will grow into a solid linebacker. Then again, maybe he'll balk when you ask him to hit somebody and end up at the end of your bench.
Recruits often get ranked by how athletic they look. But coaches can't even pretend to see the stuff they've wanted to quantify forever: toughness, smarts, desire, perseverance. Take Colts safety Bob Sanders, arguably the NFL's best defender these days. Sanders grew up in Erie, Pa., dreaming of playing in Happy Valley. But Joe Paterno wasn't interested. Either he didn't think Sanders was fast enough or he didn't realize the guy was battling through a broken foot most of his senior season. Then again, it could have been the 5'8" thing. Whatever. Sanders signed with Iowa, then beat JoePa's Nittany Lions each of the four times the two teams faced each other.
And here's one more variable that can't be measured: how well a recruit will handle his newfound celebrity. Impressionable egos inflate as the spotlight around them grows. Coaches on the chase and reporters trying to keep up give a kid VIP treatment that is way too easy to get used to. Do you know if such an experience will have a long-term effect on an 18-year-old? Because if you do, you're the only one who does.
It can be no surprise, then, that even the best coachesâ€â€and programsâ€â€whiff on the evaluation process every now and again.
In 2003, USC landed what is considered the greatest recruiting class in modern history (or basically in the eight or so years since that whole Internet thing exploded, but you get the point). The 28-man haul included a Heisman winner (Reggie Bush), a future starting QB (John David Booty), the school's all-time leading touchdown-maker (LenDale White), an All-America center (Ryan Kalil) and probably one of the first five players drafted this April (Sedrick Ellis).
And none of them was the guy the Trojans were really fired up about. That was wideout Whitney Lewis, a rugged 215-pounder who supposedly clocked a 4.35 40. "Whitney was The Guy," says Ed Orgeron, the Trojans' recruiting coordinator then. "No doubt about it. He was gonna be the next O.J." But Lewis never had the focus or the drive he needed. In three seasons, he never cracked the Trojans' two-deep. Then he transferred to Northern Iowa.
In the end, the hard truth about Signing Day is this: All you can really count on is that the hype will be even stronger next year and there will be another bandwagon to jump on. Oh, and one more thing.
We'll be sucked in all over again.
Everyone looks good on signing day. It's the worst kind of tease.
by Bruce Feldman
Settle down, Buckeyes and Michigandersâ€â€and everyone else in the Terrelle Pryor lottery. Sure, he might emerge as the next Vince Young. But he could just as easily be another Xavier Lee.
Yeah, whatever happened to that guy? Four years ago, he was the coveted five-star player who was hailed as the next all-world, do-everything QB. He was the guy who was going to get Florida State back into the BCS picture, a prodigy who could zing the ball 60 yards from his knees and run over D-backs and past linebackers. Seminoles fans dubbed him Xavier the Savior. Trouble was, when he got to FSU, as great as he looked in workouts, he was that mediocre in games. His lasers often whizzed over receivers' heads or, worse, right to the other team. Reading D's was all of a sudden a little trickier for him than it had been at Seabreeze High in Daytona. Lee was 2–2 in the games in which he played last season, before he opted to take his chances in the NFL draft after his coaches tried to convince him to move to tight end.
Lost in all the mayhem of national Signing Day, the newest football holiday, is the fact that there are almost as many misses as hits when it comes to can't-miss kids. That's because football recruits are a lot harder to project than their counterparts in basketball, where coaches have the opportunity to see the best 500 prospects compete head-to-head in AAU and on the sneaker-camp circuit. In football, the camps and combines are relegated primarily to shorts-and-T-shirt workouts, in which kids do drills and run 40s. What they don't do is play football.
To make evaluating even trickier, coaches are put in the position of having to project where a young athlete will play. Maybe that high school QB will make a good cornerback. Maybe that running back will grow into a solid linebacker. Then again, maybe he'll balk when you ask him to hit somebody and end up at the end of your bench.
Recruits often get ranked by how athletic they look. But coaches can't even pretend to see the stuff they've wanted to quantify forever: toughness, smarts, desire, perseverance. Take Colts safety Bob Sanders, arguably the NFL's best defender these days. Sanders grew up in Erie, Pa., dreaming of playing in Happy Valley. But Joe Paterno wasn't interested. Either he didn't think Sanders was fast enough or he didn't realize the guy was battling through a broken foot most of his senior season. Then again, it could have been the 5'8" thing. Whatever. Sanders signed with Iowa, then beat JoePa's Nittany Lions each of the four times the two teams faced each other.
And here's one more variable that can't be measured: how well a recruit will handle his newfound celebrity. Impressionable egos inflate as the spotlight around them grows. Coaches on the chase and reporters trying to keep up give a kid VIP treatment that is way too easy to get used to. Do you know if such an experience will have a long-term effect on an 18-year-old? Because if you do, you're the only one who does.
It can be no surprise, then, that even the best coachesâ€â€and programsâ€â€whiff on the evaluation process every now and again.
In 2003, USC landed what is considered the greatest recruiting class in modern history (or basically in the eight or so years since that whole Internet thing exploded, but you get the point). The 28-man haul included a Heisman winner (Reggie Bush), a future starting QB (John David Booty), the school's all-time leading touchdown-maker (LenDale White), an All-America center (Ryan Kalil) and probably one of the first five players drafted this April (Sedrick Ellis).
And none of them was the guy the Trojans were really fired up about. That was wideout Whitney Lewis, a rugged 215-pounder who supposedly clocked a 4.35 40. "Whitney was The Guy," says Ed Orgeron, the Trojans' recruiting coordinator then. "No doubt about it. He was gonna be the next O.J." But Lewis never had the focus or the drive he needed. In three seasons, he never cracked the Trojans' two-deep. Then he transferred to Northern Iowa.
In the end, the hard truth about Signing Day is this: All you can really count on is that the hype will be even stronger next year and there will be another bandwagon to jump on. Oh, and one more thing.
We'll be sucked in all over again.