If I had to sum up the experience of college football recruiting in just one sentence, it would be “not for the faint of heart.”
The hopes and dreams of you and your favorite team rest on the whims of a 17-year-old kid who has been told by everyone his entire life how great he is.
That doesn’t stop once college programs start calling, and when you throw in six- and seven-figure NIL deals, it can make things even more complicated.
Even once a prospect is “committed” to your school, you have to basically hope all the other potential suitors don’t swoop in at the last minute with a sweetheart deal to whisk your recruit away at the 11th hour.
LSU fans found this out the hard way on Wednesday, when five-star edge rusher Jaiden Bryant decided to start testing the waters outside of Baton Rouge.
Bryant apparently received an offer he couldn’t refuse from last season’s national championship runners-up, the Miami Hurricanes, as the South Carolina native jumped ship for South Florida and “shut down” his recruitment in the process (though that is never set in stone either).
Bryant was one of the crown jewels of an LSU recruiting class that, while small, more than makes up for the lack of quantity with star power.
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Who could have seen this coming?
Well, anyone who was on X in the early afternoon hours of Wednesday certainly didn’t, because before the future Miami Hurricane dipped out of the Tigers’ class of 2027, he made sure to let everyone on social media know just how much LSU means to him.
This was posted at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, just five hours before the famous Hayes Fawcett post that has become synonymous with breaking recruiting news dropped.
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Many such cases, I’m afraid.
Anyone who has been following recruiting for even a short period of time has had this happen to their favorite school a time or two.
Hell, one time there was an offensive lineman who verbally committed to Florida State as he was leaving his official visit in Gainesville.
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The funniest part of that whole story is he still ended up being a Florida Gator.
My point is that recruiting is weird.
As I said before, these are teenagers who are having adulation heaped onto them every time they set foot on a campus for an official visit in addition to generational wealth being thrown at them.
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I could barely decide what I wanted for lunch as a 17-year-old, so it makes sense that these high-level recruits often have trouble making choices about where they want to play college ball and, hopefully, get the proper development for the NFL.
With all that being said, there are better ways to go about choosing your college program, and I think we need to redefine the word “commitment” in the process.
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No more “hat games.” No more “flipping” three or four times a recruiting cycle.
But these pleas will fall on deaf ears because money talks.
As long as schools like Miami continue to throw bags of money at players to flip (and believe me, they aren’t the only ones), these games will continue to happen.
Recruiting is certainly not for the faint of heart, and if you want to follow this racket 365 days a year, I’d suggest you have that tattooed on your forearm so you don’t forget it.
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