Five Stars Too Many: Are We Setting College Football Recruits Up For Failure?

In our current society, we as an American public attribute a five star rating as the absolute pinnacle.

Whether it be the hottest new restaurant in the city or the fresh new summer blockbuster film, if you’re looking to gain a following, a five star rating will certainly help your cause. Receiving five stars usually means something is the best of the best.

When people see something has received a five star rating, their expectation level rises to the point that anything besides perfection becomes inadequate. We crave greatness and if something is prescribed to us that meets the criteria, we go ahead and indulge.

In America, if we expect something to be the best, it damn well better be or else.

If you’re a traveling businessman looking for the perfect hotel experience, you’re looking for the five star hotel. If you’re chef in need of the highest quality oven out there, you’re looking for the five star oven.

Ranking appliances and hotels is all well and good, but let’s for a second think about the absurdity of ranking eighteen year old high school kids in a similar manner.

Take a stroll down memory lane back to your days as a high school senior. For some of you it may take a little longer than others.

Back in those days, you probably had some sort of dream, goal, or direction you wanted your life to follow — a path of some sort. Now imagine for a second that, for whatever field you wanted to enter, you were all of a sudden thrust into a wild world were you were ranked on a national scale and forecast to be the next great thing.

There you are, in all of your high school glory, now being weighed down with the expectations of the world on your young shoulders.

Hey Drew, we know you’re only eighteen and can barely make reasonably good life decisions on a daily basis, but we have a feeling you’re going to be the greatest lawyer in the nation and we’re going to let everybody know it by posting your picture and current achievements all over the Internet. Don’t let us down.

Sounds kind of ridiculous right? Could you imagine handling that kind of pressure when you were 18?

Well, right now there are hundreds of blue chip high school football recruits who are dealing with that very burden.

Tomorrow is National Signing Day, the holiest of holy days for the religion of college football recruiting.

All of ESPN’s 71 current channels are going to be focused in on the top high school football players from around the country, hanging on their every word and hat grasp as they assume the podium at their far too over the top press conferences to break the earth shattering news of their college choice.

Subtlety at its finest.

All day long we’ll have recruiting sites and analysts telling us how terrific all of these kids are going to be because of how long their frame is or because they’re so much faster than their high school counterparts. But the truth is, at least half of these five star standout superstars will peak tomorrow. National Signing Day will be the high point of their collegiate football careers.

I know that’s kind of a pessimistic point of view, but it’s the truth, the numbers don’t lie.

Yes, it’s going to be great for Johnny Hotshot to sit on stage in his high school auditorium with the whole town in the audience and tell everyone which school will be his quick stopping point before he waltzes into the NFL and all the millions that come with it. But you have to wonder about the sensibility of it all.

Sure, of course it’s great to recognize a young athlete‘s natural ability. But maybe, there’s a limit.

Maybe, just maybe, the press conferences, the ESPN interview features, the Youtube highlight reels and all the crazy hoopla that goes along with this eccentric recruiting process is just a little too much for these young men to handle at this point in their lives.

When everyone’s hammering into your brain how great you are and how great you’re going to become, it’s easy to see why many of these highly regarded recruits get so easily caught up in their own hype.

Just ask Kyle Wright, or Jimmy Clausen, or Fred Rouse, or Willie Williams, or Mitch Mustain, or one of the many other “next big things” who became casualties along the way.

Take a few minutes out of your day sometime and go back and look at all the past five star recruits of the last few years who never amounted to more than just a great looking high school ballplayer with a world of promise.

So whose fault is it that so many of these future stars fade instead of shine?

You can point the finger at a lot of different folks.

You can point it at the recruiting sites who pump these kids up to near biblical proportions and give them the type of fame that most simply aren’t equipped to handle.

That’s an easy target though. Sites like Rivals and Scout are just services that give college football fans a glimpse of future talent. Maybe they’re a little too overzealous with how they rank and discuss prospects, but that’s bound to happen.

How about we point the finger at the college football coaches who promise these kids the world on recruiting visits, assuring them that their specific school is best equipped to get them to the NFL and fulfill their every dream.

They love to make things sound so easy during the courting process, but once those boys sign over their life on the dotted line and actually arrive on campus, it’s a complete 180.

But coach, what happened to all the pretty cheerleaders, the stretch hummer limos, and all the promises you made to me on my recruiting trip? You said you were going to rename the stadium after me and retire my jersey, how come you’re treating me like just a nobody now, I was one of the top recruits in the country according to Rivals?

The answer, Johnny Hotshot, is because that’s simply the viscous cycle of all this recruiting madness.

Do you know what Nick Saban, Brian Kelly, and every other big time BCS coach is going to be doing on the night of National Signing Day?

They’re going to be holding a press conference in front of all the donors, club members, and “important people" telling them how great this year’s recruiting class is and how bright the future looks.

Hey boosters, we got six blue chip prospects this year; time to break out those checkbooks to build the new weight room.

So in the end, maybe it seems that all of these big time recruits are just victims — victims of the hype cycle.

It’s every one of these young men’s dreams to play in the NFL and you better believe every coach and recruiter knows that and plays on that dream to perfection.

Why do you think the first thing schools like LSU and USC show a recruit on his visit to a school is the plaque with all the previous first round names on it?

See Johnny Hotshot, you can be one of those names too. Come play for us, we’ll get you there, no problem.

When it comes to college football recruiting, it’s all about the pitch and who you’re throwing it at.
 
The pitch to the fans and the boosters: This recruit is one of the fastest kids in the country and he has a chance to be a star for us.

The pitch to the recruit’s parents: Our most important priority is getting this young man a college education.

The pitch to the recruit himself: Come play for me and we’ll get you to the NFL.

Recruiting is a game, and really when you get right down to it, it’s an art form.

The most successful college football coaches have a salesman trait instilled deep down within their souls and when it comes time to recruit, they sure know how to bring it out.

You can say college football recruiting is a shady world and you’d be totally right.

One only has to look at the recent Cam Newton mess to see that. But really, that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

On the surface, everyone has to make it seem like the most important priority is getting these kids a college education even though many of them don’t have the academic foundation to handle college level work, will rely on tutors to survive, will be forced into taking the easiest possible fraud majors, and in the end likely won’t graduate.

Sure there are certainly exceptions, but when you look at the numbers and statistics, the facts are the facts.

These big recruits, time and time again, just become victims of the system, promised the world, promised greatness, only to fall short because they were given too much too soon.

Do yourself a favor and rent a movie called Year of the Bull one night. It’s a fabulous documentary that follows the senior season of Taurean Charles, a top defensive recruit who played for the prestigious Miami Northwestern Bulls, one of the most successful high school football programs in America.

Charles, while extremely talented on the field, is a complete misfit of a person. He gets into fights with coaches and teammates, throws temper tantrums, blows off school. But that doesn’t stop him, however, from reeling in scholarship offers from many of the country’s top college football programs.

He ultimately chooses to play for Ron Zook at Florida, believing, like so many others in his position, that it will be his true ticket to the NFL.

And what ultimately ends up happening? Charles becomes just another victim of the cycle, flaming out because, as increasingly seems to be the case, he wasn’t equipped to handle life as a college football player at a major university. He ended up getting kicked off the team after allegedly assaulting and slamming a beer keg on a helpless fellow student during a party.

So as you watch tomorrow’s Signing Day festivities, I ask you to watch with a little bit of caution and skepticism.

Remember that just because the folks at ESPN decide to hype these young men up as “the future” doesn’t necessarily make it so.

Don’t get me wrong, some of these guys could very well turn out to be the 2011 version of Michael Dyer or Marcus Lattimore. For every Jimmy Clausen, there’s also an Adrian Peterson.

You do have to remember though that college football recruiting is a huge crapshoot and nothing is exactly as it seems.

It’s impossible to decipher which of these five star recruits will live up to the hype and who will end up being the next big dud at this point in time, but it is possible to appreciate this crazy system known as college football recruiting. It’s a system in which stars are born before they even have a chance to enroll in college classes.

Tomorrow, every one of these big recruits will get the chance to bask in their fabricated glory, but after that, the playing field becomes devastatingly equal.

Go ask Ronald Powell, last year’s No. 1 overall recruit, if anybody on the Florida Gators team cared about how many stars were attached to his name when he arrived in Gainesville last year.

It’s great that these kids have set themselves apart as high school athletes, but college football is a different level.

I know people are already predicting that this year's top recruit, Jadeveon Clowney, is going to rewrite college football’s sack record. But sometimes it's better to be a little more realistic, even if that very word doesn't mesh well with the world of recruiting.

Tomorrow, everyone's star gets the chance to shine.

Whether many of those stars burn out and fade right after that still remains to be seen.