Nebraska Football: Huskers Land High School Long Snapper Gabriel Miller

Michigan caused a lot of wide-eyed disbelief when it used one of its few remaining scholarship offers on long snapper Scott Sypniewski.

It's not that Sypniewski's a bad long snapper by any stretch. He's one of the best in the nation. It's just that the Wolverines have what's likely going to be one of the top three recruiting classes or so, if not the best itself, so what's up with the long snapper?

As it turns out, Michigan might actually just be ahead of the curve on this one, as Nebraska has now gotten into the long snapper recruiting game, offering Gabriel Miller at a recent "Big Red Weekend" event. Quite understandably, Miller immediately accepted the offer, according to the Lincoln Journal Star.

"They put a high priority on special teams, and that was a big deal to me," Miller told Scout.com. "They put it up high on the totem pole."

The 6'0", 235-pound Miller is highly regarded at his craft. The product of Penn High School in Mishawaka, Ind., works with long-snapping guru Chris Rubio, who ranks Miller third nationally among long snappers in the 2013 class.

"You have to have the speed of the snap, the accuracy, consistency, the size, the spiral, the athleticism, the mentality," Rubio told Rivals.com (h/t Lincoln Journal Star). "And he's got all of those."

On one hand, the long snap is every bit as critical to the success of a special teams play as anything else. If the snap sails over a punter's head or bounces aimlessly toward a helpless field-goal holder, the play is immediately a disaster regardless of what anyone else on the team does.

So locking up quality there would appear to be of a higher priority than most teams generally place on long-snapping.

At the same time, though, the success rates of long snaps are already really, really good, even when the snapper doesn't have a full ride, so even if a scholarship-level long snapper achieves 100 percent success, he's still used so infrequently and is at such a generally successful replacement-level position that this would prevent maybe one or two field position disasters a year. Is that really worthy of one of 85 scholarships?

Granted, we are not coaching football here, so if Bo Pelini and Brady Hoke really want to go down this road (in June of a recruiting year, no less), they've got more authority to say it's a good decision than we do to say it's laughable.

But if we're going down this road of scholarships for long-snapping, what's next? Scholarship waterboys? Well, actually, that might not be a terrible idea.