The Recruiting Hat Dance

So let's say a kid in Louisiana plans to sign with Alabama, and someone in the crowd is wearing an LSU T-shirt. By the letter of your law, the recruit ought to get dinged for that?
Or, it's up to the recruit to escort that person out of the building "by any means necessary" -- awfully vague wording for what's likely to be a 17- or 18-year-old with a large ego, sense of entitlement, and an entourage that's eager to enforce his will and unlikely to back down when the person in the audience says "no."
I don't mind the idea behind your rule. It'd be hard to enforce, though.

 

The players get so little of the spotlight. Give them this.

 

Bingo!

Wait, who's more important to the victory, Bobby Petrino at $3M/season or the star QB & RB at $30k/yr?

 

I know. Part of me agrees. What a thrill for a 17-year-old.

It has led to extremes, though, and the media help fan the flames.

Who needs an entourage?

 

I wanna find the first high school kid who held a press conference for this bullshit and kick him in the dick. Now every moron with more than one offer feels the need to call all the local media to inform them he is attending Slap U. Narcissistic bullshit for a generation which already screams "Look at me!" more than any other prior.

 

Blue font alert!!!!!

 

That's how I meant to say it.

 

That reminds me of a scene in a late 80s/early 90s movie called "How I Got Into College". It was a humorous look at a few students of different backgrounds and them taking the SATs and trying to get into this one fictional college, along with the admissions staff and the debates they would have over who would get in. It starred Anthony Edwards, Lara Flynn Boyle and a few others.

Anyhoo, one of the characters was this star football player who was being recruited by all the big schools, including the fictional one. They showed the coach offering the kid stuff, the kid had a girlfriend who was always speaking for him and telling him what other schools were offering, etc.

So it comes down to decision day, and the kid is standing in front of a TV camera with GF and coach, who's smoking a cigar. Kid is asked a question, the girlfriend starts answering and he tells her to chill. Then he tells the TV woman that he loves football, but it's only a game, and decides he wants to indulge in intellectual pursuits. Then he puts on some nerd glasses as the coach's jaw drops and the cigar falls out of his mouth.

It was a fun little movie that I enjoyed especially because I could relate to it, trying to get into college myself at the time.

 

"Breaking Away" was pretty much the same morality tale.

 

It's intentionally vague.

What would happen would be the recruit, not wanting his eligibility for half his freshman season to be pissed out the window because some dumb fuck in the audience decided to wear some other school's T-shirt in order to conduct a cock-grabbing stage show, would direct his "entourage" that any such persons were to be removed face first from the press conference to the asphalt parking lot outside.

Which is the exact idea. If recruits know, "if anybody at my press conference makes a public show of rubbing shit in the faces of other schools, my eligibility gets fucked up," they will put a very forceful stop to it. Problem Solved.

 

Well, you can't legislate a rule like that based on mandatory behavior by people offstage. All it takes is one outsider to intentionally screw things up.

Just keep the folks onstage from showing other team's stuff.

 

In practice it would probably work out that way but it would provide a big incentive for the hotshit recruits to order all the flunkies and jock-sniffers in the audience not to get any crazy ideas about staging crotch-grabbing pageantry of their own.

Hotshit recruits (in the sports that matter) are very used to issuing orders around the high school -- and having them followed. Might as well let them issue one for a good reason.