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Recruiting gone wild
College football coaches offering scholarships to middle-schoolers should be banned or looked down upon.
Seriously, how far is too far when it comes to college football recruiting these days?
Apparently, offering middle-schoolers is fair game to some college coaches. ESPN reported that LSU offered 14-year-old Dylan Moses a scholarship Wednesday, while Washington received a verbal commitment from quarterback Tate Martel (both are eighth-graders).
Long gone are the days where kids are, you know, kids. It's a shame, actually. It's not fair to these kids to have to face this much pressure when they can't even drive themselves to the practice fields.
Granted, Moses might be a 6', 205-pound athlete who can run a 4.6 in the 40-yard dash and Martel might be a 5'11"-180-pound quarterback with a gorgeous spiral, but recruiting them straight out of middle school is a ridiculous notion.
It's also an insane option to have for college coaches.
Perhaps this is the environment both the media and college coaches have created.
High school recruits have numerous stories on them done by various media outlets, and by the time they arrive on campus, they're pretty much well-known by the die-hard fans of their school.
And as for the coaching aspect of it, well, no one can deny that college football recruiting has become a game in itself. Every coach wants to get the upper hand on opposing coaches and if that means recruiting kids in middle school, by all means, they'll do it. Hey, whatever it takes to get a head start in recruiting, right?
The NCAA should step in and do something about this. Just like college coaches fear NFL scouts coming in as "pimps" and swaying their athletes, college coaches are basically doing the same thing with these 14-year-olds.
Putting unwarranted pressure on a kid's shoulders whose biggest decision should be what they want mom or dad to fix them for dinner is almost as bad as having NFL scouts make improper contact with collegiate athletes. Some might argue that it's worse.
And it's not like this is brand new territory for the NCAA either. As a matter of fact, Lane Kiffin and USC offered 13-year-old David Sills in 2010. If this keeps up, pretty soon college football fans will know the names of countless ninth-graders and will be searching for the next great junior high prospect.
This simply shouldn't be the future of college football. But as recruiting news continues to gain more popularity throughout the years, this could become commonplace.
Jake Martin is a summer intern with the Sentinel. He is sports editor for the Nicholls Worth and a featured columnist for Bleacher Report.
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