National Signing Day makes us feel dirty all over (as usual)

Hunter S. Thompson once wrote of college football recruiting, “It is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench … a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.”

Alright, truth be told, Thompson was actually discussing the television industry when he penned this phrase, but it’s certainly no less applicable to recruiting. And if the thieves and pimps run free the other 364 days of the year, one can only imagine the mayhem that takes place within the inner sanctum of college football on National Signing Day. This year’s edition looks to be no different, and possibly worse, as the four-letter family of networks and print media continues to expand its cottage industry of misinformation and rumor-mongering.

Here’s what we can confirm about National Signing Day 2010:

1. Several hundred young men will renege on several thousand verbal commitments.
2. 117 BCS coaches will step up to a row of microphones and tell a room full of reporters that they got every kid they went after.
3. Lane Kiffin (or Twitterbots pretending to be Lane Kiffin) will do or say something stupid (see below).

Other than that, it’s all a big crapshoot. Here’s the best of the best of the worst of today’s cavalcade o’ fun:

• QB named “Munchie” signs with Cincy (please, no Marinovich jokes) (College Football Talk)
• Because it’s never too early to get a jump on next year’s fictional rankings (MaxPreps)
• Four-star DT snubs ‘Bama, Vols for… Lobos? (College Football Talk)
• Wouldn’t you have loved to have heard Bobby Bowden try to pronounce “Bjoern”? (Tomahawk Nation)
• Redshirt freshmen ready to make an impact this fall (Rivals)
• Jose Jose signs with UCF UCF (Orlando Sentinel)
• OT cites Kiffin’s absence as reason he spurned Saban for Vols (The Tennessean)
• Good news, Ole Miss fans, you have the 17th-best class in America. Bad news, Ole Miss fans, you have the seventh-best class in the SEC (Rivals)

Lane Kiffin congratulates Vols