Like so many others who frequent the recruiting board and try to follow recruiting, I have come to wish more and more that there were some some sort of metric for a recruit's level of maturity and overall sophistication.
For a decision so important to their future (and to rabid fans, of course), recruits often come into the process light years apart from one another in terms of the sophistication of their decision process. Take a recruit such as Mark Ingram, for example, who seemed to weigh a lot of factors when making his decision. He took his time, laid out his priorities, and made a call. He relied on the advice of mentors and explored his options.
Compare that to recruits (and I won't name any) who seem to favor whichever school called them last. You can find examples of guys who repeatedly switch commitments, or who express interest in schools that make absolutely no sense for them. For those of us who put time into following recruiting from a fan's perspective, these are the truly infuriating cases.
In reality, this is unavoidable. You will always have kids like Mark whose lives have been steeped in football and whose mentors give them sound advice. They will be mature, sophisticated, and make rational decisions along the way. And there will always be recruits who are emotionally and psychologically overwhelmed by the process, who have no reliable voice of rationale in their life. And this latter group will cause devoted fans a great deal of heartache.
In the end, I guess I just wish there was some indicator that would allow recruiting junkies to know which case they are dealing with. It just seems that we know so much about these guys (height, weight, 40 times, ACT scores, etc.), but in other ways we know so very little.
For a decision so important to their future (and to rabid fans, of course), recruits often come into the process light years apart from one another in terms of the sophistication of their decision process. Take a recruit such as Mark Ingram, for example, who seemed to weigh a lot of factors when making his decision. He took his time, laid out his priorities, and made a call. He relied on the advice of mentors and explored his options.
Compare that to recruits (and I won't name any) who seem to favor whichever school called them last. You can find examples of guys who repeatedly switch commitments, or who express interest in schools that make absolutely no sense for them. For those of us who put time into following recruiting from a fan's perspective, these are the truly infuriating cases.
In reality, this is unavoidable. You will always have kids like Mark whose lives have been steeped in football and whose mentors give them sound advice. They will be mature, sophisticated, and make rational decisions along the way. And there will always be recruits who are emotionally and psychologically overwhelmed by the process, who have no reliable voice of rationale in their life. And this latter group will cause devoted fans a great deal of heartache.
In the end, I guess I just wish there was some indicator that would allow recruiting junkies to know which case they are dealing with. It just seems that we know so much about these guys (height, weight, 40 times, ACT scores, etc.), but in other ways we know so very little.
