Signing Day

If you believe all the hype, then the Big Four schools, plus ECU, had a banner day yesterday on National Signing Day.

In my younger days when I had to know the BIOS of every player, I believed all that guff about who the best players in the country were.

Yesterday, ESPNU had nine hours of coverage of signing day across the country. The so-called headline players, the ones who will get all the press during the next four years, aren't the real stars of signing day. It's the fringe player who fills in at tackle after another player is hurt that no body cares about on signing day.

The team that can come up with those type players are the real winners on signing day. No one will know who the winners are for two to three years.

Notre Dame, under Charlie Weis, up until yesterday had been a Top 10 every year in recruiting. On the field, they have barely been Top 50.

The reality is a recruiting class is only 25 percent of any team. If like Wake Forest, you like to red shirt your freshman class ,then only 20 percent as those players will be with you five years.

Coaches go after holes they need to fill over sometimes signing the best overall player. But recruiting is still the perception that we are on the way up not treading water or heading backwards.
The 24-hour news service and 24-hour-a-day sports has produced a hype into our world that everything is much better than it is, or in the case of the news, worse than it is.

Sorry, but I don't need to see on network TV a child kidnapping live all day in Des Moines. Ia. The networks need to fill the day with something.

Unfortunately, ESPN has not been able to get teams to play games live at 7:30 in the morning so they can have show them. Heavens knows they have probably tried.

Yesterday, WITN-TV7 featured three Gryphon signees. Bravo to them. They didn't make them out to be the next coming of Wake Forest football, but three local kids who have an idea what they will be doing for the next four or five years.

For a family, signing day is a joyous time. A culmination of a dream come true. In our world today, do you know how much a football scholarship means to a family?

I wish instead of telling me how great LSU is going to be next year with all the recruits they have. Networks would show how important signing day really is.

Our economy is such that a higher education is further from main stream America because most families can't afford to pay a house payment much less a college education.

The real winners on signing day is Mom and Pop. Everyone of them regardless of how good their kids are in football, yesterday they were the No. 1 signing in the country.

Congratulation to all of them!