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Pastimes : College Football: Nits, Gators, Bruins, Vols - Whoever! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: happynappy who wrote (7557)	2/4/2003 12:35:38 PM
From: shadowman	Respond to of 11146

Napster...I feel your pain.<g> There's been a groundswell of skepticism on the Syracuse football board concerning the credibility of the recruiting ratings services...Rivals...Insiders...etc. Must be just a coincidence that this increase in doubters coincides with SU's precipitous fall off the charts.<gg> Here's an interesting article about the recruiting process. accessatlanta.com The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 2-4-03 Recruit on Web may be bogus By MARK SCHLABACH Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer Montego Powers was the can't-miss kid. He was a prototypical defensive end -- 6 feet 4, 270 pounds and ran the 40-yard dash in 4.6 seconds. All the recruiting sites on the Web told you Powers was among the South's most-wanted college football prospects in the spring of 1998. Georgia wanted him. Florida wanted him. Florida State wanted him, too. Not bad for a kid who didn't even exist. Steve Patterson, publisher of one of the upstart recruiting sites, dreamed up Powers to determine if a rival company was stealing his information. Even Powers' high school, Garden City High in Augusta, was fictitious, as was the interest by major colleges. "We made him out to be an animal," said Patterson, now publisher of UGASports.com, a Web site that covers Georgia athletics. "We wanted to make him one of the biggest and baddest guys on the field. He was a great tackler and very aggressive player. He just wasn't real." Sure enough, a rival Web site added Powers to its list of top prospects in Georgia. Determining what information is true and, more important, what isn't, is a daily battle for publishers of Web-based recruiting sites. Most of their information comes from the actual recruits and their high school coaches, who often exaggerate their skills or the sincere interest they're getting from colleges. "I think there's a lot of misinformation out there, whether it's from fans, the players themselves or their coaches," said Jeremy Crabtree, a Texas-based recruiting analyst for Rivals100.com. "It's getting tougher and tougher. With the way the Internet is now, it's very easy for a player to sell themselves." Crabtree and a few other recruiting analysts were duped this year by linebacker Travis Tolbert of Henninger High School in Syracuse, N.Y. Starting last summer, Tolbert sold himself as a wanted recruit by sending e-mails to the publishers. He told the analysts he had received scholarship offers from more than a dozen major college programs, and had scheduled official visits to, among others, Alabama, Florida State, Miami and Ohio State. Rivals.com ranked Tolbert as a three-star safety, among the top 75 in the nation. But when someone finally got around to calling his high school coach, the cat was out of the bag. The coach said Tolbert was probably a Division II prospect at best, if he qualified academically. "Travis is not a bad kid," Kenninger High coach Bob Campese said. "He's just a little delusional." The most infamous example of a bogus recruit came in 1993. Arthur McDuffy was a college football coach's dream. He was 6 feet 6, 305 pounds and a straight-A student. McDuffy played at tiny Mount Pleasant Academy in rural Mississippi, but the secret about his untapped potential eventually got out. G&W Recruiting Report, then a well-respected recruiting service, ranked McDuffy among the nation's top 22 high school seniors. Street & Smith's preseason football magazine named him honorable mention All-America as an offensive lineman. McDuffy, too, was too good to be true. Somebody had dreamed up McDuffy and anonymously phoned the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger. "News" about McDuffy hit the recruiting grapevine and his name eventually made it on all the blue-chip lists. One college coach even traveled all the way to Mount Pleasant to meet McDuffy. "I felt really bad for the guy," former Mount Pleasant coach Rodney Jones told the Orlando Sentinel two years ago. "Not only did I have to tell him there was no such person as Arthur McDuffy, but I also had to tell him that we didn't even have a football team and hadn't for two years."