Sports are filtered through increments of time that are predictable and reliable.
A college football game is four quarters long, each lasting 15 minutes. The Michigan game is the last game of the season, and it always takes place in late November. You will get either extremely bored or extremely angry during a game against an out of conference opponent with exactly nine minutes and forty-eight seconds left in the third quarter. The Domino's pizza tracker is always 15 minutes behind on game days.
These are the temporal guideposts that we structure our lives around every fall, and if they didn't exist the whole operation would collapse into anarchy. We need the reassurance that something in sports is static, because otherwise how the hell else does anyone expect us to consume 10-12 hours of football in one day (while also dodging every other responsibility in our lives)? That kind of predictability is essential to our sense of self during football season.
Recruiting laughs in the face of all of that.
Signing Day is the same day every year, right? Hell no, we just added a new one! But at least recruits have to be done by the second one? No! They don't! Also, don't recruits kind of have certain times of the year they like to commit, like during camps? Kind of, but sometimes they get distracted by something on Instagram and forget! And sometimes they commit on Christmas!
It is kind of amazing and awesome that a sport which is based on achieving some kind of clockwork precision when it comes to the execution of the thing, is beholden to teenagers with no real interest in that at all unless they're actually on the football field. I've been a high school educator for over a decade now and have been active in education even longer than that, and one of the few things that I can tell you about teenagers for certain is that while they are often fun and interesting and passionate, they are almost never what anyone would call predictable.
Which is great! It sucks if you're trying to stake your emotional well-being on their collegiate choices, but a) you shouldn't do that in the first place, b) it's still kind of fun even if you do, and c) it kind of rules that the recruiting cycle is the mess that it is.
C is true because while yes, trying to read the tea leaves buried in cryptic Tweets and Snapchat filters is mostly a fool's errand, sometimes, mercifully, it all comes together and your Ohio State Buckeyes rack up recruiting win after recruiting win as high school recruitments that were previously a small trickle becomes a gigantic wave and all of a sudden you end up with a top five recruiting class in the country.
In December of 2017, six recruits from the class of 2018 decided to commit to Urban Meyer and Ohio State, and a few months later in April six more from the class of 2019 hopped on board.
June of 2019 has similarly been productive; with six more recruits (including some pretty fancy flips from the Keystone state) joining the Buckeye ranks and more possibly on the way before the end of the month, Ohio State fans can safely forget that just a few weeks ago we were getting rumblies in our tummies about a sparse 2020 recruiting class.
Though it may not seem like it to Ryan Day or Mark Pantoni or other people In The Know, these wild turnarounds are thrilling to follow and watch precisely because of their unpredictability, their bucking the concept that football in general should be orderly and sensical.
The caveat here, of course, is that none of this is completely random. Early signing periods, spring games, summer camps, the commitment of other players, etc. all play a fairly significant factor into how and when and to where a recruit will commit. Guys like our very own Taylor and Andrew are locked into the rhythms of the recruiting cycle, and know and understand them better than anyone.
But for the layman (like say, myself, for instance), there's always room for surprises and unpredictability, which is the true value in following college football recruiting.
This weekend might see even more Ohio State football commitments, adding to an already epic month of June for Ryan Day and company. Or it might not! Either way, the suspense is killing me.
I hope it lasts.
