Joe's Take: Recruiting, So what?

I have never been a big follower of football recruiting until recently. I caught myself doing something that I never would have expected. I found Joe McKnight on www.Facebook.com and was looking for any indication of where he might be headed to school in the Fall.

For those of you who might have been in a hole the past few months, Joe McKnight is the hot shot running back from John Curtis High School in La. So here I am looking at all these Facebook groups that Joe is a member of and wondering what in the world this guy is thinking. We have the Nick Satan group along with several Ole Miss football groups. Ole Miss? Why would this guy go to Ole Miss? Would this guy really go to Alabama if he thinks the coach is the equivalent of the devil?

I start to think maybe this guy is just playing along with the hype and toying with the college football fans. I don't really know where this guy is going to school, and don't I have better ways to spend my time during the day than trying to decipher that information through comments on Myspace and Facebook? The emphasis placed on recruiting has definitely grown in the past few years. I just wonder how this effects the athletes being recruited.

These are 18 year old kids that have an enormous amount of pressure on them by coaches and alumni. These kids have coaches and websites calling them and sending them text messages all hours of the day. While these kids, some of whom are struggling academically, need to be focusing on getting out of school with a diploma where they can even play college football. If these kids are told every day that they are the greatest and are shown that by seeing themselves on TV, and being talked about all over sites like Scout.com and Rivals.com, then how does that effect them? Might they get a boosted ego? I would certainly think so. That boosted ego can only hurt them when they try to adjust to the college level.

Some of these players are used to playing the majority of the game on offense and defense, and then they come to college and have to sit out an entire season. We also need to look at whether or not the fans are wasting their time in following recruiting. Many of these recruits turn out not to live up to their famed status. While we will never know why they fail to excel, we must consider that it may have something to do with the attention paid to them. If someone tells you or you hear someone discussing how great you are at something, would you work as hard to get better? Probably not.

While I am not saying that people should not follow recruiting, I do think it is time we step back and think long and hard about how this process is affecting the people that are supposed to come first, the student-athlete.