Exploring the Impact of Online Recruiting Sites: Is Faster Better?

For my first featured column, I'm importing a story I just finished for my college newspaper about online recruiting services. Enjoy!

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Former Cal wide receiver Brian Stumpf recalls a time when college football's new faces were, well, new.

"I remember when I went to (Cal) games as a kid," he says.  "You didn't really know the freshmen on the team until you opened the program."

These days, college football fans don't wait nearly that long.

With the prominence of online recruiting services and the immense attention gathered by the process, some freshmen arrive on campus with the recognition of seasoned veterans.

"The Internet has changed the game," says Chris Nguon, a staff writer for BearTerritory—the Cal branch of the recruiting website Rivals.com—and a former employee of the Daily Californian, the University of California's student-run newspaper. "Fans are now looking for every scrap of information."

And browsing the sites, it's hard to imagine what more can be provided.

Rivals.com, which has reached 11.5 million unique viewers as of this January, has a database of thousands of high school prospects from across the country, complete with video highlights, player evaluations, and rankings of individual schools' recruiting classes.

Paid subscribers also find out about players' official visits, the coaches who recruit them, and are able to discuss recruiting on message boards with fellow fans.

And as a testament to the level of demand for the inside scoop on recruiting, the site provides updates on the status of key prospects via text message for the truly dedicated followers.

"I think it's good for the fans, especially in college sports," said Stumpf, who graduated from Cal in 1999 and is now a Senior Director of Event Development for the high school sports site ESPN RISE.  "It gives them something to follow during the offseason...an outlet or another topic to get excited or disappointed about."

But Cal head coach Jeff Tedford believes that some of the the coverage has gotten out of hand.

Unlike the universities themselves, which face NCAA restrictions on the amount of contact allowed with prospects, recruiting services have unrestricted access to the recruits.  As a result, Tedford feels that the exposure given to the young prospects may be too much, too soon.

"I think it puts a lot of pressure on the kids," he says.  "It puts them in the limelight right away. And the kids have enough to do without every move they make, having to justify things, or what did that visit mean or how did that go."

Tedford notes the trend of early commitments that started on the east coast, along with increased communication via the Internet, have combined to push the recruiting process earlier and earlier, as schools try to stay competitive.

Just how accelerated has the process gotten?

"It didn't seem like there was much press," Stumpf says about his high school experience without sites like Rivals or Scout.com. "I think it was a benefit to a lot of kids that rose up later...waiting to have big senior years."

Stumpf was one of them, only playing football his final year of high school.  He received his offer from Cal just a couple of weeks before Signing Day in 1995.

These days, he believes a prospect in his position would be far behind in "trying to get attention from some of the bigger names, some of which had already filled up their recruiting lists."

"For elite kids (now), there's a lot of guys that will be juniors this fall that have already had a lot of contacts from college coaches," he says.

Tedford feels the acceleration of recruiting has created another problem, in that both the prospects and the coaching staff often make premature decisions, resulting in de-commitments.

"It puts the kids in a tough situation to make decisions maybe before they're really educated on what the place is all about," he says.

While the prospects can withdraw after verbally committing without consequences, it does not work the same way for the universities, says Cal defensive line coach Tosh Lupoi.

"On the university side, once you make an offer to an individual, or he verbally commits to you, it's a done deal and there's no going back on it," he says.  Apart from legal or academic violations, he says that the schools can't revoke a scholarship to an incoming player.

Despite some drawbacks, the emergence of online services has provided substantial benefits for the coaching staffs, who otherwise have limited contact with recruits.

"We really utilize the Internet sites as a form of updates, to see what's going on with guys off the field, where their interest level is, in what programs, and the initial film stage," says Lupoi, noting that it is still important to trust only the more established sites.

Yet when it comes to how much stock college staffs take in the online scouting reports, even Stumpf admitted that "Cal would be a program that would say, 'We could care less.'"

"We don't believe in offering someone a scholarship just based on a highlight film," Lupoi says, insisting that a prospect's online profile is only the beginning of the evaluation process.

"We want to know about their character, their academics, how they are off the field and in the community, and we also physically want to evaluate game film," he adds.  "And then you also have to take the factor of how that recruit fits into your schematics."

If that means passing up on a talent that may push Cal's recruiting class into the online top 10, Tedford says so be it.

"[The class ranking] is a by-product of what goes on in recruiting, not a goal," he says.  "We're going to recruit the right guys and if they happen to be a two-star, then we're going to recruit them because we like them."

Considering some of the school's past two-star recruits, including center Alex Mack, receiver Robert Jordan, and linebacker Mike Mohamed, the coaches' own approach seems to be working.

The effects of online recruiting are mixed, but one thing is for sure: There's no going back.

"The bottom line is they're providing a service, and they make money off of it," says Tedford.  "It's a big business, and I don't think that's going to go away anytime soon."

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