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Tommie Frazier's Recruiting Story at Rivals.com

By Jon Johnston

Rivals.com has a short piece - Tommie Frazier's Recruiting Story - that y'all might find interesting. I found the following excerpts of interest:

Tommie Frazier - the best college quarterback in college football history.
One thing I was looking for was for a guy to come in and not tell me what I wanted to hear. Tell me what they think is going to pan out and let me decide. You hear a lot of coaches these days… going into a kid's home and telling them what they want to hear. When it's all said and done, and it's not like (the way the coach said), the kid is going to leave. Just tell me the opportunity that I have and don't guarantee me that I'm going to start. Say, 'Hey, if you have an opportunity and you go there and learn the system, you have a good chance of playing. Whether you start or not, that depends on you.' (Former Nebraska assistant and current Alabama defensive coordinator) Kevin Steele and Rick Stockstill, they didn't sell me on the school. They sold the school on me."

Tommie Frazier turned out to be (arguably) the best college quarterback in the history of college football. He became a leader early in his college football career, and it's clear from this statement that he had a good idea of what he was looking for.

Late last season we did an interview with Division II phenom Danny Woodhead, who talked about the fact that he wanted to go to a school who really wanted him. I suppose that if we asked 100 former Division IA players, we'd get 100 different perspectives on the recruiting process.

Two history-making guys who had clear ideas about what they wanted from a school - clear ideas of what they were hearing (or not hearing) from recruiters. Both turned into leaders, hey, maybe there's a connection here somewhere?

Frazier doesn't particularly like how the recruiting process has changed since his own college experience.
"When I was being recruited, you didn't have all this outside media attention. People speculated, but no one knew where the player was going until that player committed. And usually when a player committed, he stuck to that commitment. These days, you see a guy commit here or there, then he decommits from that school. With everything that's going on, it's commercializing the whole deal. It's not as fun as it was in the early '90s when I was being recruited."

No doubt most will remember Jimmy Clausen's recruiting story - announcing his commitment to Notre Dame at the College Football Hall of Fame - but he's at one end of the spectrum, and he'll pay for his bit of fun as all of us will be watching and waiting for him to suck.

I can't imagine the number of young kids that get sucked into the recruiting industry and begin to believe their five star ranking counts for anything (or that a single star rating counts against them somehow). It has lead to greater commercialization of college football, something the sport doesn't need as a whole.

The recruiting process is out of whack. Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot we can do about it other than to remember that it's all a fantasy world and keep our views in perspective on that basis. The consequences of that fantasy world has a real-world impact on young lives. What you need to remember is that none of these guys assigned themselves that five star rating you expect them to live up to, so except for that Clausen kid, cut them some slack once in a while.

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