It all started with Tony Jefferson.
Jefferson was an incoming senior at Eastlake High School in San Diego for the 2010 graduating class. He was rated as the No. 10 overall recruit in the nation by ESPN for football as a athlete.
I happened to come across his name while scanning the Internet, searching for information on UCLA football.
Jefferson committed to UCLA in July before his senior year and stated in an ESPN interview, “I just think the opportunity to play early at UCLA was a better fit for me. I won’t be taking any visits either, I’m done with recruiting.” Good one Tony.
Jefferson had previously committed to Stanford during his junior year and then committed to USC in April before switching his commitment to UCLA only three months later.
During his senior season, Jefferson began flirting with a variety of other programs including Michigan, Oklahoma and best of all, USC.
He took official visits to all of those programs, with the Trojans being the last on the same weekend as the USC–UCLA game.
Jefferson went to the game decked out in USC gear and decided to go over to the UCLA players to say hello. To his and everyone else’s surprise, the Bruin players were less than amused and treated him ““ how should I say ““ poorly.
After the visit Jefferson decommitted from UCLA and said, “The UCLA players really disrespected me before the game,” Jefferson said. “When they saw me, they were all cussing at me, telling me to never come around Westwood again and things like that.”
A month later Jefferson decided to attend Oklahoma.
While most people would be frustrated by this kid’s total lack of understanding of the word commitment, I loved every second of his recruitment.
I have always been a professional sports follower and the allure of the front office is too much to resist. The draft, free agency, trade deadlines ““ I simply cannot get enough of it. There’s something about the idea of changing variables or new blood that I am infatuated with.
So of course, once I got to UCLA and started following college sports, recruiting became my new obsession. It was the epitome of everything I love about the front-office side of sports.
It has a concrete side with every major scouting service giving ratings and stars that signify the potential of a recruit, but it also has a completely fluid variable with the fact that 17- to 18-year-old kids are making major life decisions.
Over the past decade, the recruiting scene has come to the forefront of college football, and it is now becoming an extremely profitable and popular aspect of the sport.
This is shocking in a lot of ways considering there are thousands of 50-year-old men paying approximately $120 for a yearlong subscription, such as Scout.com, to intently follow the careers of high school athletes.
On the flip side, though, when people look at the ratings of some of the elite players or teams that land these players, those are the programs that tend to be the most successful.
Perennially, Texas, Florida, USC, Alabama, Miami, Ohio State, Notre Dame, etc. are in the top 10 for recruiting classes and those are the same schools that are usually seen in the AP Top 25.
While the idea that the better the recruits, the better the team is primarily true, there are exceptions. Boise State, TCU and Utah have made a living out of bringing in lower level recruits and turning them into top-notch college football players.
Then there’s the curious case of UCLA. The Bruins are looked at as one of the top recruiting forces on the West Coast and in four out of the past six seasons, the Bruins have reeled in a top-25 ranked recruiting class in the nation.
Yet in the past six seasons UCLA has only had three winning seasons and one season with double-digit wins.
Penn State is a school with a similar track record recruiting-wise with UCLA being that they usually average somewhere between 10 and 20 in the yearly rankings. The difference is that Penn State has had six winning seasons in the past six years, including three 11-win seasons and two nine-win seasons.
This, of course, raises the wonderful question of, “Why?” While many people point to coaching as being the main culprit, there are other variables at play. My personal theory happens to be the value of a redshirt season.
UCLA currently has seven redshirt seniors on their roster, only four of which were from the original 2007 recruiting class. Penn State on the other hand has 13 redshirt seniors on their roster for the upcoming season.
It is really hard to argue that a team with twice as many players with four years of college football experience under its belt doesn’t have a major advantage.
UCLA has bred a culture where bringing in four-star athletes and letting them play only two months after being in college is the norm. Sure, every once in a while an Xavier Su’a-Filo or Brian Price comes around, and they see early playing time but that’s the exception.
Having a year to learn the playbook, develop physically and most importantly, acclimate to the college climate is invaluable.
Where would Stanford’s Andrew Luck, the best player in college football, be without his redshirt year? Where would Richard Brehaut be if he had used his redshirt year?
While this is an interesting theory, it is not a law. Last season as a true freshman at Oklahoma, Tony Jefferson had 65 tackles, seven for loss, two sacks and two interceptions in a season where he was named co-Big-12 Defensive Freshman Player of the Year and a first team Freshman All-American.
Now how can UCLA fans not look at those numbers and want to bash their head against the nearest desk?
Personally, I find it hilarious. It’s so funny how the smallest decisions from a 17-year-old can make such a major impact. That right there is why I love recruiting.
Email Ruffman at jruffman@media.ucla.edu.