Signing Day Adam – A Meditation

Signing Day Adam being, of course, the day before Signing Day Eve.

Feel free to use that one, and you’re welcome.

That to the side, longtime followers of TRC will remember  that I profess absolutely no interest in recruiting.  This representation of ambivalence is carefully crafted with an eye toward giving me an aloof detachment from the entire dirty process.

But it’s all a lie – I absolutely DO follow recruiting – just not the daily ebb and flow of commitments, decommits, bags of cash doled out at the local Mcdonalds (that’s a CTU fan conspiracy favorite from back in the Squeaky Watson days), etc.  Instead of getting wrapped up in all the drama, I prefer to take a million-mile view based on the final class rank.

I then sit back and wait a year or two and see who from the class actually enrolled and whether or not they actually contribute to the team.

To illustrate by contrast: this morning on WCCP’s Mickey Plyler Show, the co-host (name escapes me but he sounds young and over-eager) was waxing enthusiastic about all things recruiting and remembering what he described as the “most free publicity Clemson has ever received until the big winning streak this year in football” (quick aside here – no idea what winning streak he is talking about, so it must not-a-been much).  That event, he opined, was the signing day press conference from 2008, where Jamie Harper, Daquan Bowers, and Kyle Parker all inked with the Tigers as a part of the supposed #2 class in the country.

How’d that work out for them?  Counting, of course, the redshirt year for some of the signees, I guess that great class did win the coastal division and the ACC championship, but it also lost three straight to the Gamecocks, lost a Charlotte Bowl to South Freakin Florida, and set the all-time NCAA record for a lopsided bowl loss.

They couldn’t see that coming in the 2008 press conference, could they?

My point here is this:  enjoy signing day, but don’t stress out about it.  It will all work out in the end, and signing day braggadocio notwithstanding, all of our football programs will be about where they were before all the ink hit all the Wednesday paperwork.

One prediction – there’s gonna be a big surprise or three.  I base this entirely upon the following: its been quiet in the southeast this recruiting cycle.  Too Quiet.  All of the pundits are talking about how the recruiting game has changed and is now pretty straightforward, standardized, and boring.  This guarantees, of course, that recruiting Armageddon will arrive on Wednesday.  So prepare yourself accordingly.

Not that any of it really matters.