| 31 January 2012
I'm reading Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers: The Story of Success. It's a fascinating work that studies the circumstances which help mold ultra-successful people. There is a lot more to success than you might think. The typical American thought process on success is that smart and talented people work harder than their peers and ultimately become successful in their field. That's the American Dream, but it isn't that simple. While hard work and talent are certainly critical to success in any venture, those aren't the only ingredients. Timing, opportunity, expectations, access, and cultural factors all play a major role in success. For instance, Gladwell writes that Bill Gates just so happened to go to one of the few middle schools in America that had a computer in the late 1960's. Gates spent hours learning how to program and write code. Had Gates been a youngster in any other city or at any other middle school or in any other time in history, the world might not know the basics of the PC as we have them today. Would Bill Gates have been any less intelligent had he not had that access? Of course not. Would Bill Gates have been any less driven had he not been able to work on his craft at such a young age? Of course not. But Bill Gates is a product of excellent timing, unique access, nurturing support, and endless opportunity.
National Signing Day 2012 will once again be a huge event. Hundreds of websites will enjoy record traffic, and countless radio and television shows will profile the nation's top high school football talent. It is not uncommon for recruiting junkies to take off work on the first Wednesday in February and spend the day trying to make sense of their favorite team's recruiting haul. And I've got news for you, National Signing Day is only going to get bigger. But what created this monster? This relatively new phenomenon of sports lunacy had to start somewhere. The NCAA doesn't directly benefit from high school kids choosing hats off of a table. So what factors built National Signing Day into the huge event that it is today?
1. Football is King
In case you haven't noticed, football is far and away the most popular sport in America today. The effects of football's popularity are felt in many different ways by many different people and organizations. The latest Harris Interactive Poll shows that college football has caught baseball as America's 2nd favorite sport behind only the NFL. With the increase in popularity that college football has enjoyed it only makes sense that the event that has the largest single impact on college football rosters would be heavily followed. There is no draft or trades or collectively bargained free agency period in college football. Those events are all widely covered and heavily critiqued in each of the major professional sports. In their absence, college football fans have turned National Signing Day into their once a year roster shake-up extravaganza. An event so big that it is comparable to the MLB trade deadline, NBA free agency, or the NFL Draft. Without football's immense popularity, National Signing Day would go by largely unnoticed.
2. The Recruiting Website
I remember when the internet was new (at least to me), and there was some website called Rivals.com that had the audacity to charge subscribers a monthly fee for their service. Before that, I am told, the real recruiting junkies would get their information from subscription magazines and that even 1-800 recruiting hot-lines briefly became en vogue. As a kid I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to pay money to read online about some high schooler who may or may not even play for Tennessee. My budding business mind thought that Rivals.com didn't have a shot. Boy was I wrong. In 2007 Yahoo! bought Rivals for the gigantic sum of 100 million dollars. Clearly there was a market for a website dedicated to recruiting.
Today there are dozens of sites that focus on the year-long battles within the recruiting world. Rivals.com and Scout.com (which was purchased by Fox in 2005) are still the big boys on the block, but ESPN.com has in recent years poured a ton of resources into their recruiting coverage. Anything the Worldwide Leader puts dollars behind is bound to attract consumers. In 2010 a couple of the founding executives of Rivals started a new venture, 247Sports.com. They have quickly become a viable resource for the recruiting nerd. These websites and others lay the foundation for the National Signing Day craze.
3. Instant Information
We want our information right now, and we get it right now. Today it is being reported that Otha Peters has flipped on his commitment to Tennessee and will sign tomorrow with Arkansas. Twitter is melting. Message boards are going crazy. But, if Peters had pulled a similar stunt in 1980 no one would even know about it right now (assuming, of course, anyone actually cared back then). We would have to wait until our paper was delivered in the morning to even find out about such an occurrence.
Recruiting news is immediate and constant and always fluid. The internet, and specifically social media websites like Twitter, were made for recruiting coverage. Fans can live and die with each kid's official visit. We can mourn the loss of a switched commitment or rejoice in the addition of a new 4-star defensive back. Instant access to information is what drives recruiting junkies wild. Without it National Signing Day would be far less dramatic.
All of these factors come together to build National Signing Day. National Signing Day is a uniquely American event. It could only happen within a culture that cherishes sport the way we do, is full of brilliant entrepreneurs who are eager to capitalize on that obsession, and is followed by consumers who demand their information immediately. National Signing Day is wild, wacky and full of drama and excitement. It could only happen right here, right now.
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