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As we are embarking upon what could be one of the biggest days in UK football history, Mark Stoops and his staff have expressed the good and the bad of social media and its effects on recruiting.
This writer has walked the path of recruiting down through the year’s right up to the present and it’s a much different look than yesteryear. There’s has always been an intense interest in the recruiting scene but there is now a very different set of the lenses it’s viewed from a localized perspective. Presently the nature of the beast is in the form of Scout.com, Rivals.com, ESPN recruits and 247Sports Recruiting. That is a much more coast to coast nationalized look at the recruiting scene. In addition to that, Face book and Twitter has introduced a cyber look.
In the latter days of Fran Curci’s UK regime, he landed a big-time recruit from Cincinnati Moeller named Doug Williams when Moeller was in the height of their glory-years. After Williams first game (1980) at UK he declared he wanted Robert Cobbs starting job at guard and the following Saturday he started. Cobb widely thought of as UK’s most productive lineman transferred.
From there spawned and intense interest in national recruiting and Moeller in particular. To such an extent that local Melvin Turpin mentor and philanthropist Melvin Cunningham and I were on their mailing list of which they fielded three teams. An eight and ninth team, a ninth and tenth grade team and a junior and senior team and their revered coach Gerry Faust went on to coach Notre Dame. He turned out to be a bust at ND.
At the time there were several independent recruiting services covering and publishing college football recruiting; many of which we perused yearly. We first subscribed to Blue Chips at the time published out of Houston, Texas.
At last year’s SEC football media days in Birmingham, Alabama, local media (97.3 The Zone) personality Max Howell and I were conversing about the evolution of recruiting coverage and how it’s become big business. Howell once conducted the SEC Skywriters pre-season tour. In 1978 Max Emfinger and Allan Wallace started Superprep magazine. Emfinger got his start out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana some forty years ago, now Max Emfinger at Max Emfinger. He has achieved a great deal of acclaim.Along about the same time Tom Lemming based out of Chicago, Illinois had his National Prep Report. He got started as a stringer for some Chicago publications on high school sports and it evolved into traveling 50,000 miles from December to June as he started publishing his publication affectionately looked at as the “Recruiting Bible.” His analysis of football talent almost always glorified Notre Dame recruits but we know of their overrated statue as evident of a fifteen-year string of no BCS bowl games. More on the overrated status later.
A gentleman by the name of Phil Grosz had a reputable publication that many swore by. He is another independent that got swallowed up by the aforementioned recruiting beast. Grosz is now localized with the Blue and the White Illustrated that covers mainly Penn State recruiting.
Bill King, who is now with 247Sports Radio affiliated with CBSSport.com. King is heard on SirusXM satellite radio. He is one of the few survivors that still have a national voice. King at one time was big in southern football recruiting.
Mark Stoops says that regardless of the extensive recruiting coverage he still puts a premium on proper evaluation of talent. As evident of the reaction committed recruit Regie Meant a two-star defensive lineman described. Meant said Coach Stoops, in his elation, almost fell out of his chair backward when he committed. Another instance of some rating evaluation supremacy is the many years that Nebraska was unrated but beating teams handily. Look at the many years recently under Barry Alvarez at Wisconsin and how they were at or near the top of the Big Ten every year. Their classes were never rated high in the national rankings.
Star ratings can’t be minimized but as Stoop declared, evaluation can never be replaced.
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