The crazy thing about football recruiting is it seems so simple: Discover prospect, sign prospect.
You can find that attitude on about any recruiting Web site message board, where many a poster pontificates that if a kid has good “measurables” and three to five stars beside his name on a talent list, you’ve simply got to have him.
It’s not nearly that straightforward, as ESPN.com’s Bruce Feldman amply chronicles in his new book, “Meat Market.”
Mississippi’s Ed Orgeron gave Feldman fly-on-the wall access to his recruiting machine, which is powered by the coach’s addiction to “The Chase.”
“It’s my lifestyle,” he said.
He pursues it by barging through 18-hour days on a virtual IV of coffee and Red Bull and with a fuse shorter than a Bears fan’s temper after a Rex Grossman gaffe. Feldman’s year with Orgeron underscores the nuances of the talent hunt as well as some of the more dubious aspects of big-time college football.
One especially eye-opening facet is the staggering amount of time Mississippi coaches spend sizing up talent, mainly on film. A whole lexicon accompanies this evaluation.
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A “two-stepper,” for instance, is a player with the speed to cover 5 yards in two strides. “Alligator fast” means good straight-ahead speed but slow lateral movement.
“Stiff hips,” meanwhile, is as bad as a rap sheet.
It’s all about the art of projecting what a teenager can do at a vastly different level of football, and it doesn’t even include the face-to-face part of evaluating, when a coach has to decipher a kid’s personality and answer the most underrated question in recruiting: Does he truly love football?
What becomes clear is that the key to recruiting is not getting the players you want as much as it is wanting the right prospects in the first place. Even Orgeron, with a relentlessness and manic attention to detail that have made him a recruiting legend, messes up, which is partly why he is still struggling to turn around Mississippi after two-plus seasons.
His 2005 recruiting class, assembled hastily after he took his job in December 2004, has been an attrition-heavy disaster, thanks to too many academic and character risks. As he pursued the 2007 class under Feldman’s watchful eye, Orgeron raised the bar in those areas but still showed a willingness to roll the dice on academics if a player was promising enough and to fight to get such prospects through the admissions door.
That made one Mississippi staff member particularly valuable because of his expertise in finding ways prospects could satisfy NCAA initial-eligibility requirements late in the game. And that in turn helped lead to the saga of five-star defensive lineman Jerrell Powe, who first signed with Mississippi in 2005 but has yet to play a down despite repeated attempts to become eligible, which included taking a slew of online courses.
The tension between academics and athletics is just one thing that made you wonder what institutions of higher learning are doing in this mass entertainment business in the first place.
Another was all the lying. Players, for instance, lie to recruiting Web site reporters, and the athletes and the coaches recruiting them lie to each other.
The biggest lie often is the oral commitment. It’s well known that football de-commitments have become as common as bruises, but the book shows how utterly meaningless these pledges can be.
Just 12 hours before signing day was to start, a defensive lineman backed out on Orgeron, who immediately responded by trying to pilfer a player committed to a third school. Little wonder that in the 48 hours before letters-of-intent start arriving, panicky coaches cling to committed prospects while trying to seal the deal with others.
The book’s most stunning sequence described the courtship of running back Robert Elliott, who had long ago committed to Orgeron but now was wavering between Mississippi and Mississippi State. In the final days Mississippi assistants staked out the kid’s house and made dozens of phone calls in a desperate effort to retain their prize.
In the meantime, Mississippi coaches prayed they would sign All-America running back Joe McKnight, whose MySpace page had become a fierce battleground among fans of schools still in the running for him.
This is a world in which a coaching staff starts with 1,000 prospects in hopes of signing about 25 at a cost that can run into the high six figures. It’s a world in which parents sometimes hire “recruiting consultants” for their kids.
It’s a world in which the pressure on assistant coaches to deliver stars is so crushing that an assistant can wind up too emotionally spent to celebrate a commitment. And it’s a world so imprecise that Orgeron’s starting quarterback today is a walk-on, not the junior-college stud Mississippi signed in 2006.
It is, to recall an old movie title, a mad, mad, mad, mad world.
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