I wonder how much the pressure from players during the national all star games play a part with players looking around? Seems like this become a growing trend for the last few years that some players take time to look at other schools after hearing the pitch from other players. Not knocking it, just interesting to see the process.
This has been something that, in recent years, has really been an added dynamic for a lot of top prospects.
For better or for worse -- and I'd argue it's almost always for the worse for individual prospects -- these guys get together and collective groupthink starts to dominate the entire picture. This has been going on for some time now, basically back to the mid-to-late 2000s, but has really began to explode in recent years, especially with all of these guys going to the various all-star games and camps now and with them being in constant contact with one another on social media.
As strange as it may initially sound, I think a lot of this has actually been inspired and fueled by the NBA and its ongoing Big Three/Dream Team roster mash-ups. Whole idea there, of course, being that a group of guys get together and they go off on some sort of a dynastic run, and I think a lot of these prospects get together and decide on schools thinking the same thing will happen. Basically, "We all like ________, if all four of us sign there we'll dominate." It's nonsense, obviously, because you need about 45 quality contributors to really be a contending football team in this day and age, and the individual impact of any one player is far less in a sport like football than basketball (or even baseball), but good luck convincing some 17-18-year old kids of that, especially when all of them view themselves as inevitably being the next Brady/Moss/Peterson/Watt/Revis.
We saw a lot of this in Chizik's first full class at Auburn, and frankly a lot of it with Ole Miss a couple of years back. Again, it's all nonsense, but it can, and in my view does, have a real impact on the decision for a lot of kids.