“Great Scott! Bridgeport is 1.21 Gigawatts of awesome!”
Happy Hump Day Cougs! Truth be told, it’s Tuesday night as I write this, but I’m pretty sure Doctor Emmett Brown works for Bloguin because it gives us the magical ability to write things at one time, but make them appear on the internet at another time in the future. It’s pretty neato. These details are surely of no importance to you whatsoever, but I’m stalling as I try to come up with an angle for this week’s post. You see, when the basketball team stinks (as Longball outlined), this time of year is nothing more than the calm before the signing day storm. Lo and behold, Lucas already covered the weekend’s recruiting news in his post. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of the work, fellas, but how about leaving a couple mid-week scraps for your boy? I’m worried that if I don’t at least occasionally write about WSU Football, the readers of the WSU Football Blog will revolt. Diligent blogger that I am, however, I must press on. The perfectly cooked steak (yes, that sound you hear is my own horn being tooted by me) and Brigeport Hop Czar Imperial IPA I just had must be settling because an idea has been slowly forming in the lump on the top of my head called a brain as I’ve rambled through this intro. While I may not have thoughts or news on specific recruits, I do want to touch on the world of recruiting in general. I will do just that, but you all know the drill. Ladies leave your man at home, the club is full of ballers and they pockets full grown and all you fellas leave a girl with a friend ’cause it’s 11:30 and you need to be jumpin’ jumpin’ (Yikes. What a terrible song. When I’m bastardizing Destiny’s Child Lyrics, the “jump” gimmick might have run its course; just click on the jump please and thank you).
In case you missed it in the comments of the aforementioned Longball post, first of all….for shame! The comments are the best. Join in the fun. Secondly, you might have missed the news that a player who was once thought to be a literal and figurative big get for the Coug recruiting class of 2012, Maurice Bennett, was told he wouldn’t be a good fit in the new Coug defense. On top of that, word came via Cougfan that the first commit of the class, Dalen Jones, has decided to take his talents to Fresno. Whether that was strictly his decision or his WSU offer also fell by the wayside is unclear, but it does run the tally of Wulff commitswho will not be signing an LOI with WSU to 9. That’s nearly half of the commits who were on board when Coach Wulff was “future endeavored”.
Much is made of the lack of people keeping their word in the ever-changing world of college recruiting, or in the case of Gunner Kiel for example, keeping their words. Players commit to one school, then change their minds and commit to another. Generally when this happens, those players are met with the scorn of of fans for whichever school they left behind. In the reverse scenario, though, you rarely see the same level of anger directed at the coaches who take away the scholarship offers that were once there. I’m not saying anyone should be angry in either scenario. I mean, certainly we shouldn’t be angry at Coach Leach. He’d probably have to kick a recruit’s puppy as he told him he no longer had an offer to even get us to think about being perturbed at this point. Our love affair with him aside, he and his staff every right in the world to determine which players they want on their team. Unfortunately, this leaves a lot of those kids standing around looking for a chair when the proverbial music stops. In the case of the former would-be Cougs, the chairs are left in places almost entirely outside of the BCS limelight. Is this a reflection of the caliber of player from whom Coach Wulff was getting commitments or did these kids get stuck with limited options once their plans were changed? I don’t know the answer to that, but I know it doesn’t feel good for the parties involved. Where do you stand on this, Cougar Nation? If you can set aside the fact that players committing now are more highly touted, is it OK that a scholarship offer can be yanked just as quickly it was given?
Another issue that has come up lately is the ever-changing locations of assistant coaches. I don’t know if it’s always been this way or it’s just more exposed now because that’s how the world is in 2012, but assistant coaches are now garnering a high profile in the world of recruiting. This has even impacted our little corner of the Inland Northwest. The prevailing theory is that the influx of former SMU commits potentially switching commitments to Wazzu is directly related to the departure of ace California recruiter Adrian Klemm to UCLA (with an assist from June Jones’ dalliance with Arizona State). Just this week, Twitter just about exploded for an hour when word broke that the Huskies, (yes, those Huskies) had lured Tosh Lupoi from Cal’s coaching staff to theirs. I had never heard of Tosh until this week (especially since he’s not the guy with the show with the funny videos), but speculation ran rampant that Cal’s top notch recruiting class was in jeopardy, with some of the top flight recruits now considering, gulp, Washington. It may amount to nothing and the prospects involved may very well end up at Cal as planned, but it just adds another layer to marginalize verbal commitments, those from both the kids and the grown-ups involved.
I’m not sure how to mitigate the issues, unless you start allowing kids to sign LOI’s as soon as they are offered and eliminate the verbal commitment which is more and more becoming a ludicrous practice anyway. Unfortunately, in the event of a change in coaching staff (which is also seemingly a more common occurrence), this leaves the new guys with a bunch of kids they may or may not want and may or may not fit their system. This would also potentially leave the players committed to a program suddenly run by a bunch of strangers. I think that as much as we want it to be different, we have to accept that the high school players involved are free to change their minds, as are the coaches who evaluate those players. What’s frustrating for me as a fan is that this is just another of the unseemly aspectsof college football that we just have to accept as status quo. I love college football and I especially love the wacky world of recruiting. Unfortunately, they come with their fair share of stuff that makes me feel at times, for lack of a better word, yucky. Unless of course Robert Lewis and his righteous hair switches his commitment to the Cougs and Kenny Lawler can’t nail down a visit to Oklahoma State and gives WSU a visit instead. If that happens, forget everything I said, because recruiting is awesome! Also, Bishop Sankey is a doodyhead.
If you want to be “in the know” like I am as it pertains to the latest recruiting news, first re-evaluate your aspirations and priorities, then if you really do want to be in the know, sign up for Twitter and follow these people:
@GregBiggins, ESPN West Coast recruiting analyst
@LakenLitman, Texas; she’s been very much in the loop on all the SMU guys
@JakeWorthen, Scout.com West Recruiting Analyst, and all around swell guy
@BrandonHuffman, Scout.com national recruiting analyst and West Regional Manager; all around swell guy
@TaraTurnura, Fox Sports Field Reporter. Also, how do I put this….YOOOOW!!! OWWWOOOOOOOGA!! Holy crap, that’s one beautiful lady!
@Huddlestron, Actually, that’s me plugging myself like I do.
Real quick on hoops…I’m predicting a split again this weekend, even though I don’t know off the top of my head who we are playing. That’s what this team has done to me!! I don’t even know who we are playing this week! With that in mind, I’ll leave you with a quick list of things better than Ken Bone:
“Bad to the Bone”>Ken Bone
Bonefish Grill>Ken Bone
Bone Thugs N Harmony and each of its members, Layzie Bone, Flesh-n-Bone, Bizzy Bone, Krayzie Bone and Wish Bone>Ken Bone
The bone in Pebbles Flintstone’s hair>Ken Bone
“The toe bone connected to the heel bone, the heel bone connected to the foot bone, the foot bone connected to the leg bone”>Ken Bone
Props to whichever of the blogfathers originally used this schtick on the blog’s Twitter feed. Sorry for stealing it so shamelessly. I think I’m done now. Go Cougs.
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