{"id":4356,"date":"2021-12-01T14:41:48","date_gmt":"2021-12-01T19:41:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gridironstuds.com\/blog\/?p=4356"},"modified":"2021-12-01T14:41:48","modified_gmt":"2021-12-01T19:41:48","slug":"committing-to-the-uncommitted-in-college-football","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/committing-to-the-uncommitted-in-college-football\/","title":{"rendered":"Committing to the Uncommitted in College Football"},"content":{"rendered":"

By: Chad Wilson<\/strong>
\nTwitter: @gridironstuds<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Two days ago I had a vision of Brian Kelly doing an in home visit for LSU watching Notre Dame play a college football playoff game with a recruit and his family.\u00a0 Soon thereafter he fields a question from the recruit’s mom…. “do you plan on staying at LSU?”\u00a0 Sounds like a Saturday Night Live skit but that’s actually real life in 2021.<\/p>\n

That vision is not what lead me to writing this article.\u00a0 It was a question I was asked on Twitter by a follower:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The tweet was in response to a comment I made on the following tweet<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It’s a really good question and I will share my thoughts on it in this post.\u00a0 If you have followed me at all on the tweety bird app you have seen my recent obsession with impatience of fanbases and the weak administrations that give way to their carefree whims.\u00a0 Social media and Twitter in particular,\u00a0 is a space where anything can and will be said.\u00a0 As such,\u00a0 fans say a bunch of things and they say it a lot.\u00a0 The stadium boos and yells at the TV have been replaced with endless tweets on a Saturday evening as the sting of a loss and missed expectations start settling in.\u00a0 Who’s expectations were these?<\/p>\n

These annual expectations are hatched in the minds of people who work a 9-5 doing something that’s not football.\u00a0 For certain their 9 to 5 does not put them in the building or practice fields of their beloved football programs.\u00a0 So on top of not having the general knowledge they don’t have the functional knowledge of what’s going on in the football department.\u00a0 \u00a0All they see is what they get on their streaming device on Saturday afternoon.\u00a0 The real ones know that there’s a lot that goes into the product on your screen.<\/p>\n

Over emotional college football fans should not be the lynch pin for what direction an athletic department heads in.\u00a0 The adults in charge have the ability to ignore the average fan protruding his anger through aggressive screen taps on a social app.\u00a0 However,\u00a0 our traditional media have increasingly shown an inability to ignore the circling buzzards and deliver the madness to the feet of the admin at press conferences.\u00a0 Far be it for me to try and reverse this current trend developed by the fans and the media.\u00a0 Believe me,\u00a0 I’ve tried and they just have too much invested in it.\u00a0 \u00a0I don’t have an in to the athletic directors and presidents at these esteemed universities so I have to craft my message to you,\u00a0 the recruits and parents of the recruited.<\/p>\n

There was much to consider when my two sons were going through the process.\u00a0 They both did so within the last decade just to give you some perspective.\u00a0 Crazy as it sounds,\u00a0 neither came up in the world of the transfer portal,\u00a0 NIL and rampant coach ejections.\u00a0 Sure,\u00a0 coaches were getting fired during their time but that rate has seemingly doubled since my last faxed in his national letter of intent.\u00a0 So,\u00a0 whether or not a coach was going to get fired was on the list but not high up on the list of things to consider.<\/p>\n

If they were to enter into the process today,\u00a0 potential coach firing would be much higher on the things to consider list.\u00a0 Coaching turnover is an important factor in choosing a school.\u00a0 There was a time when the biggest worry is that a guy would have success and leave for a bigger job at a bigger school or the NFL.\u00a0 \u00a0However,\u00a0 Nick Saban’s dominance has benefitted Alabama and U-Haul,\u00a0 everyone else,\u00a0 not so much.\u00a0 Coaches are being given very little time to equal the success that Saban has taken a lifetime to build.\u00a0 Yes,\u00a0 Saban has been at Alabama for 15 years but to discount what he learned in his journey leading up to Tuscaloosa would be foolhardy.<\/p>\n

Fanbases are convinced that Saban has the secret recipe that calls for a sprinkle of this and a splash of that.\u00a0 If their recent hire by their school does not have that recipe and bake that pie in 2.5 years,\u00a0 out come the pitchforks.\u00a0 Some schools like Oklahoma St., Iowa, TCU, Utah and Northwestern<\/a> don’t pay attention to the crusaders.\u00a0 Other places like Texas, Florida, Florida St., USC and Miami<\/a> are virtual voodoo dolls for their Twitter fans.<\/p>\n

My strategy to you as the recruit and family getting ready to open the doors to the theater of the insane is to find a quiet seat in the corner. Make it a pledge to survey the landscape and pay attention to the history of the universities in question.\u00a0 Are they helter skelter and run guys out of town quickly?\u00a0 Better to avoid them.\u00a0 There’s one way to make schools behave in college football and that is through the actions of recruits.\u00a0 Start rewarding the programs that provide the stability for the players that you would desire for yourself or sons.\u00a0 There’s a logo on that letter of intent but let’s be real,\u00a0 you are signing it because of what a man told you.\u00a0 \u00a0When he leaves,\u00a0 most of it is null and void.<\/p>\n

When that next coach shows up on campus you are at his mercy.\u00a0 You are at the mercy of his system,\u00a0 his personality and the promises he makes out on the recruiting trail as he attempts to impress his new boss.\u00a0 None of that is what you committed to when you fed those papers through the fax machine on an early December of February morning.\u00a0 Maybe you’ll get a like-minded guy to the one who left but I doubt it.\u00a0 After all,\u00a0 they fired that guy remember?<\/p>\n

I applaud Penn St. and Michigan St. for recently making long term commitments to their head coaches with 10 year contracts.\u00a0 That makes it a little harder to dispose of the program leader like an ink pen that deared to not produce a quality stain when used.\u00a0 Sometimes you gotta give it another try or shake it a little bit.\u00a0 We teach our young men very little about handling adversity when a 7-6 season following a 10-2 one means you don’t get to finish out the season.\u00a0 How dare you look at them with squinted eyes when they hit the transfer portal.\u00a0 It seemed crazy when Jimbo Fisher inked the first 10 year deal for a coach at Texas A&M.\u00a0 \u00a0Jimbo’s bringing in a top class to College Station.\u00a0 Tucker and Franklin’s deals no doubt spearheaded the similar ones given to Lincoln Riley and Brian Kelly.\u00a0 \u00a0We can argue about the absurdity of paying a coach $100 million but for now,\u00a0 I take my hat off to the only resemblance of commitment that this game can produce for us at the current moment.<\/p>\n

Speaking of commitment,\u00a0 carefully consider yours when it comes down to it.\u00a0 At the end of the day,\u00a0 a life lesson learned now or in the future will be a commitment to the uncommitted typical ends in broken dreams and resentment.\u00a0 Do it enough and it will drive you crazy and get you committed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By: Chad Wilson Twitter: @gridironstuds Two days ago I had a vision of Brian Kelly doing an in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":4359,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1154,1153,1003,112,1155,1156,1152,260,714,891,324,1143,1144,689,988,1136,1103,1157,25,1145],"class_list":["post-4356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-choosing-a-school","tag-coach-contracts","tag-college-football-coaches","tag-college-football-recruiting","tag-commitment","tag-decommit","tag-fired","tag-florida","tag-florida-state","tag-iowa","tag-miami","tag-northwestern","tag-oklahoma-st","tag-recruiting","tag-signing-day","tag-texas","tag-transfer-portal","tag-uncommitted","tag-usc","tag-utah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}