With the Super Bowl looming, Tom Brady and Eli Manning will be garnering all of the sports media’s attention from today through next week. Yesterday, however, belonged to a new wave of football players—with Wednesday’s National Signing Day, college football fan bases wavered between elation and despair, depending on whether high school seniors chose to take their talents to Alabama, Auburn, LSU, or some other elite program.
Though National Signing Day has always been a tradition, the same hype did not surround Manning or Brady when they made their decisions.
Today’s college decision hype machine produces all kinds of creative decisions, be they through Twitter, ESPN, or some other high-profile media venue. Who can blame them? If 17-year-old athletes are getting prime media attention, we cannot fault them for milking that time in the limelight for all it’s worth.
Back in September, prized basketball recruit Kyle Anderson kept fanbases at UCLA, Georgetown, and Florida in limbo before finally announcing on Twitter that he had picked the Bruins.
Anderson used Twitter to his full advantage, but such open access can also doom some players. Yuri Wright, a star cornerback at Don Bosco Prep in New Jersey, was actually expelled from the country’s number-one secondary football program after a year of graphic and vulgar tweets came to light. Though it was certainly convenient for Don Bosco to discover the cornerback’s transgressions after the season ended, his high-profile recruiting took a turn for the worse just weeks before National Signing Day, as offers from Michigan and other big-time schools reportedly fell by the wayside. Wright quietly committed to Colorado, salvaging a mess of a recruiting situation, while also not-so-quietly making a return to Twitter.
Wright’s teammate, Elijah Shumate, committed to Notre Dame only a few weeks prior during the Army All-American Bowl for high school seniors. The event marks the typical setup for Division I-bound athletes, in which the players try on a number of hats, spurning most, and eventually selecting their best fit. This tradition has been the standard during the senior showcase for years now, and occurs in the middle of an all-star game. If NFL players are encouraged to tweet during the Pro Bowl, making a college announcement in a similar venue seems fair to me.
Still, when ESPN turns this commitment process into full-fledged individual press conferences, it seems a bit over the line. The media hype inflates high school players’ egos, only to have them sink to the bottom of the totem pole once they arrive at college as freshmen. Instead of making the best decision based on comfort and fit, it becomes a matter of appeasing the media.
Take Nevada lineman Kevin Hart. Three years ago, he committed to Cal-Berkley over Oregon in an announcement ceremony. However, neither coach at either school had heard of Hart – and for good reason, as he was never recruited by either school. The lineman felt such high pressure to succeed on the collegiate stage that he needed to make up a story behind his decision.
As fans, we must concede that this is the path that collegiate athletics takes. Admittedly, along with other Hoya fans, I dreamt of a lineup featuring Otto Porter and Kyle Anderson. And while Anderson did not quite work out, the recruiting process suitably reflects the reality of college sports—that programs can be built or broken with just one commitment.
We live and die with our sports teams–what could be and what could have been. And for that reason, the media circus that surrounds high school athletes, for better or for worse, isn’t going anywhere.
