College Football Recruiting

In recent years college football recruiting is now a full time job. It requires attention throughout the entire year. The NCAA tries to limit how much contact coaches can have with recruits to a point, but it still requires attention even if it is just to figure out who are your “plan A” and “plan B” recruits. What I mean by that is figuring out what recruits are the most important at each position and what recruits you would be willing to settle for if your primary recruit goes elsewhere. If you are unsure what college football recruiting is, to put it simply, it is all the media and attention that is spent on high school teenagers that are good at lugging around a football in college. It can be a pretty tedious process convincing numerous high school kids and their loved ones that your school is the right school for them. Many coaches have said that recruiting is the worst part of coaching in college football.

When college football first began, all the football players actually came from the student body of the college or university. Some players did get scholarships, but most of the players were actually recruited for how well they hit the books and not actually how they performed on the field. This would have been back in the late 1800′s and up until the beginning of the 1920′s. Towards the middle and end of the 1920′s colleges and universities started giving out scholarships based on athletic ability. In the late 1920′s and early 1930′s there were numerous reports of players getting paid money and not going to classes at all or even playing professionally on the weekends. In response to this many schools dropped football altogether or fired the coaches that allowed this to happen, but still things happened behind the scenes. In the 1980′s the NCAA really started to crack down on all the scandals happening in college football. Many of the old teams from the Southwest Conference were stripped of bowl games, TV contracts, and even scholarships. While the NCAA clamped down on the cheating, the birth of the internet has caused an explosion in the world of college football recruiting. High school and sometimes even middle school kids are now being watched and graded. Coaches are searching all over the country to find that diamond in the rough that recruiting scouts have not found yet.

The current big college football recruiting websites are Scout, Rivals, and ESPN. ESPN doesn’t seem to be near as accurate as the other two though. Scout and Rivals give recruits a “star” ranking. 5 stars being the best, and 1 star being the worst. It is amazing to see how the internet has changed recruiting. It is not unusual to see a press conference when a big-time recruit is announcing his college choice and thousands of college fans are collectively excited or disappointed all at once.

One of the new areas that has really picked up in college football recruiting is the social media aspect. It is somewhat of a grey area because there are not any stringent guidelines to follow. Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace are really changing the face of college recruiting. College recruiting forums for specific universities get all riled up whenever a potential recruit posts something on their Twitter or on their Facebook page.

247 Sports
247 Sport! 247 Sports! 24/7 Sports!