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Internet Recruiting Services: Are They Good?
Internet services feed the frenzy of college recruiting Players, coaches and fans rely on Web sites to find out where top players are headed Monday, January 30, 2006 In 1996, Jamie Newberg delved into a novelty called the Internet, creating BorderWars.com, a Web site focusing on college football recruiting. The site logged 80,000 page visits that year. By 2000, after he had joined an up-and-coming recruiting Web site called Rivals.com, Newberg was part of a blossoming business that, during January of that year, averaged 1 million page visits per day. And it's just getting bigger. Web sites such as Rivals.com and Scout.com have become increasingly important -- and sometimes controversial -- in the college recruiting process as coaches and recruits, in addition to fans, turn to the Web as a resource. With up-to-the-minute news flashes and player updates, Web sites put recruiting junkies and college football fanatics just a few mouse clicks away from identifying the next crop of star players at their favorite colleges. On Wednesday, as several Oregonians and thousands of high school athletes across the United States sign letters of intent to play football at Division I institutions, millions of fans will log on to recruiting Web sites to identify and celebrate the heralded four- and five-star recruits their teams landed. Rivals.com totaled 38 million page views on signing day last year, and the Web site's editor, Bobby Burton, said he expects even more this week. "We live in the information age, and there is a thirst for knowledge like never before," Burton said. "If you're a hardcore college football fan, you're not just interested in who the next Joey Harrington or Kellen Clemens is. You're interested in who the tight end is going to be or who the next Haloti Ngata is going to be." Added Newberg, now the national editor of Scout.com: "The Internet and recruiting are a perfect marriage." Rivals.com and Scout.com are the most popular sites, with more than 350,000 subscribers who pay monthly ($9.95) or yearly ($99.95) fees. Rivals.com has 1.7 million "monthly unique" users, the number of people who access the site at least once a month. Seemingly ever major sports Internet site has jumped on the bandwagon: ESPN recently launched a new recruiting service, Scouts, Inc; FoxSports bought Scout.com for $50 million last fall. Rivals.com and Scout.com, through their networks, also provide independent sites that focus on high school sports in most states and on college sports for virtually every major Division I school. For example, DuckSportsAuthority.com and BeaverBlitz.com cover Oregon and Oregon State, respectively, as part of the Rivals.com network; eDuck.com and BeaverFootball.com are partners with Scout.com. Although the sites cover a wide variety of sports issues, the main focus is on recruiting. They track and evaluate players for months, sometimes years, to find and catalog the top prospects. Subscribers can access a comprehensive database of rankings, interviews, stories and even streaming video, year-round. Thousands of prospects have their own profile pages, listing, among other items, 40-yard dash times, bench-press statistics and which schools are recruiting them. Logs of stories and videos are archived. nd subscribers aren't just fans. In the past, high school prospects received recruiting information from college coaches, and kept their fingers crossed in hopes that the information was true -- not just what they wanted to hear. Now, prospects are using Web sites to their advantage, searching profile pages and reading stories to determine which other prospects a school is recruiting and the caliber of classes that schools are building. "The Web sites were definitely a resource," said Ndamukong Suh, Grant High School graduate and University of Nebraska freshman tackle who was Oregon's top football prospect in 2005. "Not only can you check the guys who have committed to schools, you can also find out what players the schools are recruiting." "If you're given a one- or two-star rating, it doesn't mean you can't play and if you're given a five-star rating, it doesn't necessarily mean you are going to be superstar," said Faustin Riley, Kevin's father and Beaverton's offensive coordinator. "But recruiting takes on a life of its own. College boosters and alumni want to hear about all the four- and five-star guys coming in. Other good players can get lost in the shuffle." Even Web site employees acknowledge there are downfalls, including the amount of phone calls a recruit might get. Miller received offers from Cal, Oregon State, Oregon and Colorado. On top of coaches from each school trying to reach him daily, he had Web site reporters inquiring as well. At the peak, Miller received as many as 10 calls a day. "I'd leave my house, come back and there would be like five or six unavailable numbers on the Caller ID," Miller said. "And I knew they were from Web site people. Overall, the Web sites are a positive, but it definitely got annoying." Miller said there were times when he would leave the house to get away from the calls. Suh, who had more than 10 scholarship offers, said his mother commonly unplugged their home phone. "It got crazy there for a while," Suh said. "It reached a point where it was too much." Barlow senior Bo Thran, another of Oregon's top recruits, gave an oral commitment to the Ducks on Jan. 23. Because of final exams, Thran did not answer the phone that week. But Web sites, trying to trump one another, still confirmed the commitments: One site quoted Thran's mother; another Web site quoted his grandfather. And that leads to another issue: The professionalism of those who run the Web sites. Although the feature writers at Rivals.com and Scout.com have extensive journalism backgrounds, operators of some sites are less trained or experienced. In some cases, they are fans of the teams they report on and cross the line between reporting and cheering. That happened in 2004 when Brian Poe, who operated BigBlueNation.com, allowed two junior college prospects to live in his house. Poe, then a Kentucky booster, also reportedly asked subscribers to the Web site to submit information about recruits and encouraged them to contact recruits, all while he was conducting interviews and writing stories. Poe later was banned for 27 years from any involvement with Kentucky athletics. Web site insiders say this is an isolated incident, but others wonder how far an operator might go to influence recruits or boost a program. Regardless, the Internet's popularity is growing, and recruiting Web sites are along for the ride. Steve Summers of eDuck.com said he had more than 100,000 page visits the day Thran committed. Mansfield said BeaverBlitz.com, which has tripled in popularity during the last two years, averages more than 37,000 page views per day. The day Miller committed to Oregon State? "We had 68,000," Mansfield said. "A lot of Beavers were happy that day."
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