Keith Strudler: Coach Gets The Top Bunk

Not to play too much pop psychology, but we all like to feel wanted. It’s why we date, why we fight, it’s what gets us up in the morning and sometimes keeps us up at night. Down deep inside, most all of us crave the self-worth that comes, for better or worse, from someone else.

College football coaches know this. Which is why they spend so much time and energy convincing 17 year old high school seniors that they are truly wanted. That courtship comes to its odd and logical conclusion today on what’s known as “signing day,” when the best football players in the country announce where they plan to go to college, the final stanza in a multiple-act drama, where to be honest, it’s usually impossible to tell the heroes from the villains. Throughout the course of this long day, athletes from coast to coast will declare their intentions to play for this school or that school, often done in the form of a press conference in a high school gymnasium. As a spectacle, it finishes only second to the Iowa caucuses, another series of strange events often held in school gymnasiums that also beg the same question – is there not a better way to do this?

That thought notwithstanding, as strange as the courtship is between candidates and Iowa voters, it’s even weirder with college coaches and their objects of affection. Perhaps most notable this year, Michigan head football coach Jim Harbaugh did a sleepover at a recruit’s house, then drove to school with him the next day. That’s a grown man, who is by far the highest paid state employee in the history of the state of Michigan, behaving like a six-year-old in the hopes of enlisting his services on the football field for the next four years. These antics aren’t new or all that unique. In fact, if you can imagine it, and it doesn’t violate the monstrosity known as the NCAA rule book, then some college coach somewhere has done it in recruiting. They go from the obsessive, like sending hundreds of personalized letters in one day; to the exorbitant, like printing personalized heroic comic books featuring the recruit; to the downright bizarre, like holding a surprise impromptu pep-rally, where coaches and players run into the room, take off their shirts, and start jumping up and down and yelling. You literally can’t make some of it up, and it’s almost impossible to read without laughing uncontrollably. It’s so much more fun than the old-fashioned days when boosters would simply sneak a wad of bills to a kid during a handshake. Everyone says colleges don’t stress creativity anymore. At least in this case, they stand corrected. What could be more creative than sending a letter to a high school student’s cat, which actually happened?

Of course, those amorous intentions generally wane once the object of affection is actually on campus. Once an athlete is signed, sealed, and delivered, there’s little time nor reason for romance. Having already signed your amateur life away, an athlete can expect little of the same obsession, which, to be honest, might actually be a relief. Analogize it any romantic courtship – from marriage to a one night stand to anything in-between – just suffice to say, the relationship always changes once the chase is over. So as is often said, football players are never empowered as much as they are right before signing their college letter of intent. For most star recruits, that’s right this very second, if not yesterday, when coaches were still willing to sleep in your bunk bed.

Of course, the larger narrative here isn’t about how crazy football coaches can get. And they can get plenty nuts. The story is the remarkable value placed on the physical gifts of someone typically too young to vote. These four and five star specimens – and yes, it does start to feel like livestock – are worth literally millions of dollars to a select handful of Division I schools across the country. Get the right ones, and your school makes huge dollars off television and titles and donations. Not to mention your own personal capital if you’re a coach, like, say, Nick Saban at Alabama, who’s recruiting success has helped him to his $7 million annual salary. These kids might not get paid, beyond a scholarship of course, but they do make money, if only for someone else.

Not to overstate the obvious, but it’s not a system grounded in high morals. Prey on someone’s vanity to build a corporate empire. That’s a cynical, albeit plausibly true perspective on big time college football, particularly during this silly season of signing day.

If may not make you feel that good. Then again, all most people really need is to feel wanted.  

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