No National Signing Day thread?

What kills me is all the coverage that ESPN has of this.

The vast majority of the country has never heard of these kids, many of whom won't even be playing in their freshman year. Who's going to remember that some kid was ranked 99th by Rivals.com two years from now?

And what I hate worse is when the high schools have a huge ceremony for the kid to sign his LOI and pick out his stupid baseball cap.

There's a ton more students picking colleges who aren't going to be putting a ball through a hoop or throwing a pigskin around, and yet, they don't get a ceremony. Heck, there are some HS grads who are going to be fighting for our freedoms in the military. Those should be the kids honored by their schools.

Rant over.

 

In addition to stories? Or just a standalone photo?

 

Who started the baseball cap shit?
The first I can recall was Pacman Jones.

We had an incident a few years ago when our lone D-I kid decided to commit to State U. His "handler" told the SE the night before signin day and we ran a story.
The kid and several school officials were pissed because we ruined his hat pick ceremony set for the following morning.

 

As a beat writer, my favorite day of the year is the day after signing day.

 

I remember when Chris Webber did it...

 

Guys, tell me if I'm wrong on my theory of the silliness of ranking recruiting classes.

A school's recruiting class is judged by the quality of the players it signs, but in most cases the quality of the players is judged by what schools were recruiting them.

In other words, Prepster.com sees that Joe Blow is recruited by USC, Notre Dame, Florida, Tennessee and LSU, so they annoint him a Blue Chip recruit and rank him No. X in the nation. Then when he signs with one of those schools, the school gets credit for signing a blue-chip recruit, even though he may only have been judged a blue-chipper because they were recruiting him.

 

Ah, the hat switch ... It's here to stay I'm afraid, no matter how cliched it's become, just like Gatorade baths and writing your home area code on your eye black.

 

True.

And you have the recruiting gooroos who work for school-specific sites that feed info up the food chain to the national Rivals and Scouts and whoever else. You really think they're going to be objective with their rankings when they're writing for rabid fans of State U? I don't know how many times I've seen the No. 1 in-state kid get bumped to No. 2 or 3 because he chose to go out of state.

 

One of the reasons I enjoy living in New England, and positively adored when I was a sportswriter here is that nobody cares about Signing Day at all. The last time it was a big story is when Patrick Ewing picked Georgetown.

 

Signing Day is nothing.

Now, when the basketball gurus come out with their rankings of grade school kids, THAT'S the moment that should be a national holiday.

 

You mean like HoopScoop.com does?

http://www.hoopscooponline.com/members/area17/LocalRankings_1Page7.html

 

We put them in a gallery on our website. Did quite well. Nothing in the paper, though.