Groundhog Day With Huddy – Recruiting Wrap-Up

Back to not respecting fax machines until Signing Day 2013

Good morning and Happy Hump DayGroundhog Day, Cougs! I’m sure you were all devastated to have to go through a Hump Day without a post from your boy, but you may have noticed there was some other big news going on with that whole National Signing Day thing. Huge props to my main man Sutra for holding it down on This Here Blog yesterday. We’ve got a little business to take care of with the Bridgeport Pumped O Meter and I want to relive the WSU Recruiting Class of 2012 before we can all move on and worry about people actually playing football. So click on the jumpfjdasklf;a;lkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk……sorry about that I’m on cold medicine and was face down on my keyboard there for a second. Anyway, let’s get it…

Last week I unveiled the utterly ridiculous, but sneakily awesome Bridgeport Pumped-O-Meter system of ranking recruits. Since it was unveiled, a few more commitments rolled in and of course eventually became official yesterday. It just wouldn’t feel right not giving them a POM score so let’s so how the new recruits stack up:

Destiny Vaeao, DL, Pago Pago, American Samoa

Bridgeport Pumped-O-Meter Score: 10

First some background; for the last several years, I’ve had a bizarre aspiration to have a Samoan best friend (to the bouncer at the Showbox, sorry for the awkward pictures, bro, but ummm…call me!). As such, players of Polynesian decent typically fare well as it pertains to my being pumped. When the player is named Destiny and is huge and super athletic, that’s how you end up with a 10.

Robert Barber, DT, Pago Pago, American Samoa

Bridgeport Pumped-O-Meter Score: 3

I’ve gotta be honest, Robert Barber looks a little different than I expected. In fact, he looks a whole lot like a middle aged white guy. He does where a suit and I did get lost in his baby blues for a moment so he at least rates a 3, but wow. Hold on….it appears I’ve been misled by Google Image Search. This Robert Barber appears to be an Irish Chef. Washington State’s Robert Barber is a mountain of a man from Samoa. His actual POM score is 7.5. Sorry for the confusion

Jeremiah Allison, OLB, Los Angeles, CA

Bridgeport Pumped-O-Meter Score: 10

I’ve got a couple quick stories about Jeremiah. The first is that I was in my car when I got the Scout.com email notifying me of a new commit to Washington State. When I clicked on the link to see that Allison was that commit, I fist pumped and shouted, “YES!”. By myself. At this time, I’d like to point out that I’m a 30 year old grown man. Hit me up, ladies! Clearly, I was already pretty pumped about Jeremiah. Then yesterday, I was cruising across Yahoo! and saw a link to this article on the front page (not the sports section, mind you). When one of your future players is considered national news for being an awesome human being, you tend to get excited about that player. This is a kid we can all be proud to have on our side. I hope his production on the field matches his character off it.

Sam Jones, OL, All over the place

Bridgeport Pumped-O-Meter Score: 7

The dude his huge, his name is pretty awesome in its simplicity and at one time he was considered an elite high school prospect. Unfortunately, that time was about four years ago and his circuitous route through a military academy and junior college makes it hard to know exactly what we’re getting, but if he can qualify, it sounds like the coaching staff likes his chances to contribute right away. After losing so much of the line from last year, it can’t hurt to have him around.

So that’s everybody. Now that it’s all said and done, the average POM score for the Class of 2012 is a whopping 8.05. For a frame of reference, the University of Washington’s Bridgeport Pumped-O-Meter score is a 0, so we’re looking pretty good.

As silly as it is, rating these players the way I have might prove to be every bit as useful as the vaunted star system. As always, we don’t really know. I think we can all agree, though, that in a short amount of time, the new staff was able to get the attention and in some cases commitments from an overall higher caliber of high school player than what we ‘d become accustomed to. Now they’ve got the real job at hand, to turn them into big time college football players.  

So ends another recruiting cycle. This was an especially eventful one for our Cougs, with two coaching staffs involved in the process and several announcementceremonies that actually featured a WSU hat on the table. While it’s exciting being in the mix on the type of players worthy of such distinction (or who at least consider themselves worthy), it’s a whole lot less fun when exactly zero of said players end up sporting the Crimson and Gray. Cedric Dozier Watch was particularly painful. For me, it involved the live stream cutting out at the exact moment that he reached for the hats and having to find out on Twitter anyway. The tally from my first live announcement experience: 15 minutes of thank you’s, zero helpful news and zero Army All-American commitments, but hey, this stuff is fun, right?

Go Cougs.