College Football Recruiting Starting Earlier
Is it too soon to begin targeting the Class of 2016 recruits? Apparently Rutgers doesn't think so. The Scarlet Knights have made scholarship offers to two incoming New Jersey high school freshmen, including quarterback Jordan Fuller of Bergen County's Northern Valley Regional High School in Old Tappan. Fuller's older brother Devin is a one-time Michigan recruiting target (a QB/DB and a member of a state championship 4 x 400 meter relay team who might've been a good fit in the spread offense run by a former Michigan Head Coach) who's going to be attending UCLA in the fall.
Ugh, recruiting is get too weird these days. Think I might just stick to the mgoblog front page to get my recruiting news from now on.
It's Rutgers. What other chance do they have to get good recruits? Finishing in the middle of the worst AQ conference isn't going to make the top recruits dream of going there.
And I mean, it's.....New Jersey.
I know, I was half kidding. They just don't do much with the surprising amount of talent they seem to have
Since Lane Kiffin offered seventh grader David Sills, I'm not going to be surprised by any of this until someone dips into the elementary schools.
I've stolen Brian's idea about ultrasounding athletic pregnant women to write an NIH grant to study the correlation of ultrasound measurables (nuchal translucency, # of movements per minute, femur to spine ratio, etc) to NFL draft position.
What pisses me off about the whole Kiffen-Sills thing, is that it looks like its going to work out great for Kiffen, which will just encourage coaches to recruit earlier and earlier. However, had it not worked out and Sills had only been an mediocre/average QB, then it might have scared off coaches from starting recruiting younger and younger players.
Your link to the comments about Ricardo Miller may be a reminder of how recruiting banter impacts the young men who’ve been targeted as high-profile or "can’t miss" prospects.
It seems like only yesterday when Ricardo Miller was being touted as next in line to be one of Michigan’s great wide receivers. Wasn’t he almost like the Shane Morris of his recruiting class for Michigan - moving from Florida to Ann Arbor to play his senior year of football at Pioneer High School and helping to encourage other recruits to join him at U-M?
I wonder whether a writer will have a chance to speak with Ricardo Miller and get more background on his story. Despite his apparent setbacks in the program, he’s still a member of the team and he’s still a student at the university. He’d be one of the guys I’d be rooting for to do something special on the field this year, even if it involved only special teams play.
Yeah, Miller was the ace recruiter of his class. But as far as talent goes, I think Morris and Miller are sort of on opposite ends. Morris has continued his strong showing and might end up as a 5-star. Miller was ranked highly in the beginning, fell in the rankings, and ended up having a mediocre performance as a senior at Pioneer. Honestly, I'm not sure that Miller would have been offered if he played throughout his career like he did as a senior. I'm not saying Michigan should have revoked the offer, but when a kid commits early, recruits other players, and moves across the country to get ready for your school...you really have no choice but to go ahead and give him a scholarship.
I am no writer, but I have spoken to Ricardo a number of times. He was asked to change positions numerous times and has thusly either added or subtracted bulk to fit the bill. That added to the coaching change and yet another switch of positions, etc... he has been a victim of bad timing in my opinion. He is actually a VERY hard working kid and is very humble. He is working hard to reach his dream of being an impact player at UofM and hopefully make the league. He has actually reached out to me a couple of times when I was having some issues. I will root for Ricardo on and off the field and you all should too. He is a GREAT kid.
Seriously this seems to be a 'way too early' factor as this progresses. I just don't see how it can be pushed back any further, the kids are just too young.
I think this increasingly earlier trend is really fascinating, and brings up a lot of questions:
1. Will we see an early signing period?
2. Will we see the NCAA allowing official visits earlier?... it seems that kids that can't afford to fly all over the country for unofficials are quickly becoming disadvantaged as the schools they're interested in fill up so quickly.
3. What will happen to attrition rates? Related: Will we see more programs institute a "no visit" policy like Hoke's to discourage "placeholder" commits.
4. Will we see more "elite" recruits bust because they didn't grow or develop as expected in the long time from their initial rating/recruitment to their actual playing college ball.
5. Will the recruiting scene get inundated with "conditional" or "noncommitable" offers as programs try to call dibs, but want to wait and see how a kid do in terms of grade/development/character?
Wild and whacky stuff.
This isn't as new a trend as you might like to believe. Wake Forest offered NC QB Chris Leak as an 8th grader. That would have been roughly 12 years ago. These things happen.
Rutgers isn't even the first team to offer a 2016 recruit. Maryland just offered an in-state DL who already had another BCS offer
Boston College offered him first.
Offers have gone out early for a while, but the acceleration in commitments, for all of CF, that's taken over the 2013 classes and will push forward the 2014 commits has to go back to that fatefull week in February where Hoke and Co. had 8 (?) early commits.
Earlier commitments means more time to move on to the following year and even earlier offers.
Seems like a never ending cycle. At some point this has to settle back down.
Is Michigan's latest All American. He received his invite to the Army game this evening.
I'm amazed that the NCAA doesn't have a rule in place that says something to the effect of no contact with HS kids until the beginning of their sophomore year, at least. How the hell does a 14-15 year old kid know what he wants when he goes to college? How does a school know that the kid is going to amount to anything after his freshman year of HS? Far too many unknowns.
Recruiting is just getting too over the top these days. I'm barely even thinking about our 2014 class right now, much less the 2016 class.
Personally, I don't have a problem with coaches contacting them early. There should be limits (I don't think a 13-year-old should be bombarded with text messages and phone calls), but it's a great opportunity for a lot of kids. If coaches/schools want to dangle that carrot and say "If you work hard on and off the field, there's a scholarship waiting for you," I'm all for it. Some kids will use that as motivation to keep/get themselves in line.