The Crow's Nest

Feb. 6 was National Signing Day for college football. For those of you who don’t know, signing day takes place on the first Wednesday in February when high school seniors sign letters of intent to attend a certain college to play football there.

I love college football, probably more than the next person, but I hate all the attention this generates.

There seems to have been increased attention to this event in the past decade, especially from ESPN. Wall-to-wall coverage starts at 7 a.m. on ESPNU. ESPN, Rivals.com, and other recruiting services have created an industry for themselves.

The attention paid to recruiting is sickening and over-hyped. On Facebook, a good friend of mine posted, “National Signing Day should be a national holiday in the South.” The University of Alabama website hosts a webcam where the Tide faithful can watch letters of intent roll off the fax machine. All of this attention is nice for the families and athletes, but I don’t need five of the eight pages in the Tampa Bay Times sports section dedicated to recruiting the following day.

I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t mention I check the Orlando Sentinel’s website to see if anybody from Oviedo High School, my alma mater, signed anywhere. Same goes to the rest of the public schools that make up the Seminole Athletic Conference. They are local kids who went to schools I played against.

It ain’t just signing day that irks me — it is the entire recruiting process. A player can give a verbal commitment, but that doesn’t mean much of anything. Example from this year: Jojo Kemp, a running back from DeLand High School, gave his verbal commitment to South Florida, only to sign his letter of intent with the University of Kentucky.

There was a story in the tbt* about a player from Plantation, Fla. who committed to the University of Miami, de-committed, then committed to the University of Arkansas. His mother said that he ain’t going there (my Ma told me the same thing when I got my acceptance letter from the U of A). His father allowed him to be a Razorback and his mother hired a lawyer. Now that’s a recruiting story.

These are 17- and 18-year-old kids for crying out loud. Are you doing now what you thought you’d be doing when you were 17? Do the national sports media have nothing else to do except put these kids on a pedestal and pressure them to win?

We are in the middle of an intriguing collegiate basketball season. For five weeks in a row the newly minted No. 1 team has lost. The United States men’s futból team is 0-1-1 in the hexagonal, or the final stages of CONCACAF World Cup qualifying. We lost to Honduras last Wednesday.

It doesn’t matter what happens in February — it matters what happens two, three or four years later when these kids are young men starting on Saturday afternoons. Sadly, chances are most of the players won’t finish their collegiate careers with the same coaching staff that recruited them.

Look at Tommy Tuberville. He left an orientation dinner at Texas Tech on a Friday night and the next morning he accepted a job the University of Cincinnati. The coaching staff is what builds a recruiting class into a football team. The staff like “Bear” Bryant’s did and Nick Saban is doing now is what turns 18-year-olds into national champions in the years to come.

fkurtz@mail.usf.edu

Tags: ESPN, ESPNU, National Signing Day, National Signing Day 2013