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Bag of Mail

9 Signs Your Recruiting Obsession Has Gone Too Far


Wednesday, February 4, 2009


As we all sit down and madly hit refresh on our computers this morning. Enjoy. (This is from my 2007 column for CBS).

1. You get an instant e-mail alert of the latest commitments sent to your work e-mail address and start doing fist pumps and spinning circles in your chair while seated at your computer. When your boss catches you, immediately feign interest in your work and pretend something good has just happened. Then you wipe your brow and promise you won't ever do this again. Six days later you fall off the wagon and repeat your celebration.

2. You analyze the weather of a recruit's hometown in an effort to determine whether or not his delayed signing is evidence of tampering by a rival school or simply a function of the snow.

3. You convince your college-age daughter, friend or girlfriend to post suggestive comments or photos on a recruit's Myspace page. This is really the next frontier of enticement. Several readers sent me links to outrageous Myspace pages of football recruits this fall. There were legitimately girls propositioning them on public pages if they came to a respective school. This is insane and this stuff is public.

4. You miss a court-filing deadline because you're waiting on a five-star recruit to announce his decision. Not that I know any lawyers who have done this.


5. You go on opposing team message boards to talk trash about the rumored decision of a 17-year-old boy. While there you manage to get banned from posting. I've had some low points in sports-related fields: getting kicked out of a coed flag-football game for cursing, trying to draw a charge and getting dunked on, having our biggest soccer rival score a goal by mugging me, horribly spraining my ankle going for a pump-fake from my younger sister in our backyard, but getting kicked off an internet message board would be the lowest. Yet this happens all the time to people come recruiting season.

6. You hide your credit-card statements from your wife because of the hundreds of dollars a year you pay for "exclusive" recruiting updates. I have a friend who told me his wife was convinced he was hiding his porn viewing from her because every time she came into the room he would turn his laptop screen. Ultimately, of course, she caught him red-fingered. Logged onto a paid recruiting website watching high school combine videos.

7. You pepper your normal conversations with phrases like "soft verbal" "high three-star" and "medium interest." Come early February you might actually say something like the following: "I'll give you a soft verbal on Smokin' Aces for Saturday but I've still got medium interest in Hannibal Rising and I think The Last King of Scotland's got high three-star potential."

8. You compile YouTube videos featuring highlights of your favored recruits from eighth grade musical chair competitions, ninth grade flag-football outings, and one particularly dashing over-the-shoulder catch in a rainy elementary school kickball game.

9. You e-mail your friends from rival schools upon the announcement of a major recruiting coup. Emblazoned in said e-mail will be no less than six taunting expletives (perhaps starred out to keep him from being reprimanded if you're feeling ambitious), confident pronouncements of eight consecutive victories led by said recruit (even though he will only play your friend's team at most four times) and a final shot across the bow about how said recruit would have chosen your friend's school if his younger sister had only been willing to hold back her sexual consort for more than a single weekend.

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Posted by Clay Travis at 8:12 AM

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