Web of Activity Follows Recruits

In the late afternoon and into the evening of Super Bowl Sunday, urgent messages, more than 200 of them, flashed across the computer screens of these die-hard football fans.

The Super Bowl? Big deal. That could wait. These fans demanded immediate answers to a more pressing question: How did a star high school linebacker enjoy his weekend recruiting visit to UCLA?

Today is the first day high school football players can sign college letters of intent, something of a national holiday for an intensely dedicated minority of fans who follow recruiting with the same passion that fantasy baseball leaguers read box scores.

If you’re more interested in whether UCLA will sign a defensive lineman than how Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant are getting along, the Internet fills that niche with numerous sites for discussion, information and misinformation, complete with insider lingo (a player who “tripped” did not fall down, he took a recruiting visit to a college).

“Following recruiting is a strange, obsessive kind of hobby,” said Tracy Pierson, who runs the most widely read of several sites devoted to UCLA sports. “The Internet and recruiting reporting are a marriage made in heaven.”

The casual UCLA fan might recognize the names of two of the jewels of the Bruins’ recruiting class, Matt Ware, a quarterback and defensive back from Los Angeles Loyola, and Tyler Ebell, who set a national single-season rushing record at Ventura High. The avid UCLA fan could click onto scouting reports that include game statistics, video highlights, 40-yard dash times, figures for the bench press and vertical leap and months of archived commentary on which colleges the player might consider.

“It’s a little weird to see yourself up there,” Ware said. “It’s enjoyable, I guess. But we’re just kids.”

The major national sports sites, among them https://espn.com and https://cbs.sportsline.com, feature links to recruiting information. The https://rivals.com national network of team sites sponsors a fantasy recruiting game for fans eager to show they can “do a better job of recruiting than the coaches at your favorite school.”

Pierson said his site, https://bruinreportonline.com, attracted 170,000 users in December and said those fans clicked on 300,000 pages a day, many of them on message boards to discuss recruiting developments.

“We have thousands of regular users,” he said. “If their bosses knew, they’d fire them, because they’re on the site all day long.”

Although players cannot sign letters of intent before today, they can make nonbinding oral commitments at any time, and numerous sites race to be the first to report which schools players have picked.

Ware said one site operator called him at 12:30 one afternoon, then called again at 2:30. Another Bruin recruit, Texas offensive lineman Collin Barker, said he got more than 50 calls in one week. Greg Biggins, who posts on https://PacWestFootball.com as director of recruiting for Student Sports magazine, said he had heard of one high-profile recruit who got 50 calls in one day.

“These kids are really getting bombarded,” Biggins said. “That’s really the one negative I see about all this. We hate calling a kid sometimes because we might be the eighth or ninth person calling that night.”

The attention did not bother John Sciarra Jr. of La Canada St. Francis, who will follow his father as a UCLA quarterback.

“It’s flattering to have someone call you,” he said. “That makes you feel good about yourself. I enjoyed it a lot.”

Jamal Sampson did not. As a top basketball recruit, the Santa Ana Mater Dei center developed a reputation on the Internet for being flaky, because he seemed to tell each site a different story.

“You don’t want to be rude, so you talk to them,” said Sampson, who has signed with California. “I wasn’t trying to throw them off, but I was just saying the first thing that popped into my head just to get them off the phone.”

Players and fans alike scrutinize and analyze every nugget of information and speculation, sometimes jumping to erroneous conclusions and sending coaches scurrying to the phones to calm recruits and parents.

“It’s like day trading,” UCLA basketball Coach Steve Lavin said. “The speed and immediacy of information and misinformation has created a virtual reality.

“A kid thinks you’re no longer recruiting him, or he reads on the Internet he’s just a second or third choice, and two weeks later that scenario could be completely reversed. People sometimes overreact, thinking there’s something there, when 70% to 80% of the time, they’re just driving themselves crazy.”

Ware, The Times’ Central City player of the year, warned players to beware of the manic highs and lows among posters on message boards. If you’ve committed to attend a college and you play a poor high school game, fans of your college team wonder whether you’re a waste of a scholarship. Play a great game the next week, Ware said, “and all of a sudden you’re Jesus again.”

Still, players and coaches ignore the Internet at their own peril. Ask Santa Margarita quarterback Matt Dlugolecki, who orally committed to UCLA, then had second thoughts and visited Illinois without advising Bruin coaches. By the time he’d returned home, Internet sites and message boards were aflame with news of his trip, and incensed UCLA coaches called to rescind his scholarship offer before he could call them to say he now preferred Illinois.

“When I came back, they already knew. I was like, ‘Holy cow!’ ” Dlugolecki said.

No longer can a coach promise several players, “You’re the only quarterback we’re recruiting” without risk of getting caught online.

The NCAA limits coaches in their visits, phone calls and--as of last year--e-mails to recruits. No such restrictions apply to Web site operators, so coaches might read news about their recruiting targets before hearing it firsthand.

Team sites obtain recruiting information from schools as well as players, although NCAA spokeswoman Jane Jankowski said a coach would be guilty of an NCAA violation if he asked a Web site operator to obtain information about a particular recruit. Neither Web site operators nor boosters can involve themselves in the recruiting process on behalf of a school, Jankowski said.

Because players and their families sometimes visit team sites for information about potential schools, fans often post appeals addressed to recruits, trying to sell them on a school. That makes a fan a booster, regardless of whether he buys tickets or donates money to the school, and is thus an NCAA violation. The NCAA generally asks schools to identify those fans--if possible, because fans generally use screen names online--and ask them to stop, Jankowski said.

Barbara Barker, the mother of the Texas offensive lineman, became a minor celebrity on the message board on Pierson’s site, posting messages to get answers about academics and student life at UCLA and posting pictures of Coach Bob Toledo’s visit to the family’s home in Wortham, Texas, near Waco.

Barker said she used the Internet and message boards for extensive research during her son’s recruitment. What’s the buzz about which assistant coaches might leave after recruiting ends? (“A coach is not going to tell you he might not be there,” she said.) Would the absence of a pre-law major at UCLA hurt her son’s chances of getting into law school? (No.) And what about the coach who tried to dissuade her from attending UCLA by warning of the killer earthquake predicted to hit West Los Angeles in the next 10 years? (Caltech laughed.)

Along the way, she traded messages with the most rational and the most fanatical among the Bruins’ online fans.

“There’s always going to be some people that need to get away from the computer,” she said. “The majority are very supportive of the program. They love football, they love the school and they’re interested in what’s going on. It’s a pastime for them, like racquetball would be for another person.”