National Signing Day: A Nice Idea That Has Grown out of Control

I knew it was coming, but I found it hard to stomach what I was seeing and hearing on Wednesday.

What I was seeing and hearing, of course, was National Signing Day. This day was a blip on the sports radar a decade ago, but now it's turned into a day-long party. ESPN devotes a full 10 hours to it, and one's Twitter feed invariably becomes clogged with tweets about such-and-such signing with so-and-so.

It's as if somebody stitched together Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve and then handed the resulting monstrosity an NCAA regulation football. National Signing Day has become a holiday.

Here's the truth, people. National Signing Day is not a holiday. It's a depraved, over-hyped media event that has grown wildly out of control, and it needs to be stopped. 

To understand the magnitude of this nonsense, you really have to understand just how far the whole process has come. There's not much literature out there about the history and the development of National Signing Day, but I found out via Yahoo! Sports that the whole thing pretty much began in 1964 with the creation of the letter of intent program.

At that point, all a recruit would have to do was look over his offers, sign one and send it in. There were no television cameras, the word "Twitter" hadn't even been invented yet, and there sure as hell weren't any hats or props.

Now look where we are. ESPN dedicated 10 hours of coverage to National Signing Day. Ten freakin' hours of coverage, and all it consisted of was old dudes talking, and younger dudes putting on hats and smiling for the cameras.

This has become the norm for NSD, but the beginnings of the "Worldwide Leader's" coverage of NSD were pretty tame. Shawn Murphy, senior coordinating producer for ESPNU, said in a podcast that ESPNU’s NSD coverage featured a grand total of 11 interviews in its first year in 2006.

In 2012, six years later, ESPNU lined up 13 schools, 11 player announcements, and was targeting roughly 30 on-camera interviews throughout the day as part of its coverage.

It's fair to say that the "Worldwide Leader’s" coverage of National Signing Day has grown, and it's fair to say that the coverage has grown because the demand for coverage has grown. College football fans—already an overly obsessive bunch, mind you—have become rather obsessive about recruiting.

But how? And why?

The culprit is not hard to single out. The internet is responsible for most of the ills in this humble world of ours, and the widespread obsession with college football recruiting is one of them. Before the internet, recruiting had a niche audience. Now, it has a massive audience.

There’s a constant demand for information, and there are only a handful of places to get it. I suppose ESPN and Rivals.com are the two big ones, but those who must have recruiting coverage can also go to Scout.com, MaxPreps.com and 247Sports.com.

If you're just looking for general information like team and player rankings, and standing commitments, these sites will tell you. But if you want the real information—scouting reports, news, rumors, etc.—you have to pay.

It's as if a snake oil salesman is popping out of your computer and saying, "Want to see what these 18-year-olds are up to? Just give me your credit card number, and then you can go to town! But ah, eh-heh, be sure not to tell your wife where the money's going."

There are other sites like this on the internet. Those sites are deemed unacceptable by society, but shelling out a few bucks to get the latest scoop on some teenager you don't know is A-okay, apparently.

This would be weird enough, but the trouble now is that the personal disconnect between recruits and fans is no longer insurmountable. If a fan has something to say to a recruit, there are ways for him or her to do so.

When a given recruit announces which school he is going to, fans of the schools the recruit rejected invariably come calling. The wrath is even worse if a recruit has the nerve to decommit and commit elsewhere.

Take Gunner Kiel, for example. He originally committed to Indiana before changing his mind, and committing to LSU in December. A few weeks ago, he changed his mind and committed to Notre Dame.

Eventually, the news made its way to Gunner Kiel's fan page on Facebook. I'd like to share some comments that people left:

"

"Punk ass couldn't handle an SEC offense or defenses! Fan base was not really caught up in his hype due to the wavering he did with Indiana! I'm sure him and his big brother Crusty are being well taken care of by the ND deep pockets! ND has no shot again at a National Championship or the big stage! Their mystique died out decades ago! Good luck Ginger Kiel"

"Only Real players come to the SEC. We don't want half steppers. Glad your made up your mind."

"ND couldn't hold LSU's jock. Sack up, pick a conference and compete like the big boys. Maybe this kid will turn out like all the other 5 star duds you've gotten at quarterback. Glad to see ND is pre-season picked #1 again next season. Oh, sorry, that's LSU."

"

Pretty nasty stuff. And believe it or not, these represent some of the more tame comments left by Kiel haters. 

It's even worse on Twitter, where jilted fans can more easily call out recruits whom they view as villains. All the recruits have to do to view their 140-character hate mail is click on their at-mentions.

You better believe that the hate gets through.

For example, Arik Armstead tweeted this shortly after committing to Oregon:

And Shaq Thompson tweeted this shortly after committing to Washington:

Haters aren't the only ones trying to get through to recruits on social networking sites like Twitter. Fans, people with sleazy agendas, and fans with sleazy agendas will get through as well, and it's not hard for them to get their points across.

Via Gregg Bell, Washington's Director of Writing for the athletic department, Huskies head coach Steve Sarkisian characterized the situation rather appropriately:

Indeed. It's no wonder some recruits weren't allowed to go on Twitter.

No, really. Take Tracy Howard, Jr. for instance. His mother handled the social media aspect of his recruitment herself, and she had a damn good reason to do so.

"I kind of like being involved in social media," Shaiy Howard said, according to GatorNation. "I don't want Tracy on the social media, because it will make the process that much more difficult for him.

"The bottom line is that he's 17 years old. Some people will say you are all in his business, and you need to stay out of his business. Well he's a kid, so he is my business."

Damn right, and none of us should overlook that sentiment. We may not be talking about children, but we are talking about kids. They're playing an odd sort of game, one that really should not be any of our business. All of this should happen behind closed doors.

By opening these doors, these kids are being exposed to one of the most dangerous forces in the world:

Fame.

This is particularly true on National Signing Day, where the absolute best of the best get to announce their decisions in front of massive television audiences. None of them have played a down yet, but they're already stars.

You don't need me to tell you that this is the wrong message to send to these kids. Even Kirk Herbstreit, one of ESPN's own, didn't mind pointing out the inherent foolishness in signing day extravaganzas. He held nothing back:

The "me me me" aspect of National Signing Day that Herbstreit talked about is just as ominous as he makes it sound. It's not uncommon for college football players to develop big, and ultimately, hazardous egos. We really shouldn't be surprised when they do. As Herbstreit said, "This is where it starts."

To give you an example, feel free to re-live this press conference from 2008:

That, of course, was Terrelle Pryor. Weeks before he announced he would be going to Ohio State, Stewart Mandel of Sports Illustrated wrote that his decision was going to be the "most anticipated signing day announcement in history."

It ended up happening about a month after signing day. Pryor wanted more time to mull his options. Putting it off for so long was the act of a diva, and Pryor didn't stop acting like a diva once he arrived in Columbus. A little more than a year later, he was called an "egomaniac" in print by a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review writer. Probably not for the first time, and certainly not the last.

A little less than two years after that, Pryor was out of Ohio State and the program was in ruins.

If you're looking for a cautionary tale about how a big ego can do some pretty big damage, there you go. A monster was created, and the monster went on a rampage.

Kinda makes you wonder how things would have panned out if Pryor's recruitment had been none of our business.

Well, it seems to be too late now. These things that shouldn't be our business are too good for business to simply go away. The influence of recruiting websites is only getting bigger, and we've already noted how much ESPN has ramped up its coverage of National Signing Day. The end result of all this is men in suits making a lot of money.

That's what college football is for, of course, and it's what college football recruiting is for.

That's an extremely disturbing thought. It's no secret that college football is the biggest scam around, as millions upon millions of dollars are generated on the exploits of young men who are essentially indentured servants. It's bad enough that they are exploited in such gross fashion, but the way in which recruiting has become such a big business tells us one thing:

The exploitation process doesn't start once these kinds reach college. It starts well before that.

To say that this is twisted doesn't quite cut it. This is sick.

We can point our fingers if we want, but we should point at ourselves first. Recruiting is good for business because the demand is there, and that's on the fans. The circus has gotten this big and this out of control because the fans empowered it. The niche audience demanded more, and more was given. The audience is now big, and it's still demanding more.

And this brings us all the way back to our original point about National Signing Day. It is indeed a celebration, but it's not a celebration for all the people who were on our TV screens on Wednesday. Recruits get to hog the spotlight and talking heads get to talk on NSD, but this isn't about them.

No sir, this celebration is for the fans. Fans spend months pumping up recruiting, and National Signing Day is the payoff. When it finally comes around, we get to pause and marvel at our creation.

What a hideous thing it is.