Great bit of nostalgia here from The Athletic featuring a cameo from Terry Kirby and reminder that Rivals turns 25 next year.
Two decades before he became a fixture on Scott Van Pelt’s midnight SportsCenter, “Stanford Steve” Coughlin became a mini-celebrity for other reasons. A highly recruited tight end from Connecticut in the Class of 1996, Coughlin was named national player of the year as a senior by the respected recruiting magazine SuperPrep.
“I didn’t even know what SuperPrep was,” Coughlin said. “I remember when my recruiter at Stanford, (Mose) Rison called, and he said, ‘Congratulations!’ I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said you’re SuperPrep National Player of the Year. I’m like, ‘Oh, cool.’”
If he were a modern-day prospect, Coughlin would have had his own page on Rivals and 247Sports no later than his sophomore season of high school and the accompanying prestige of a four- or five-star ranking. The general public could have logged on at any time and learned that he was planning to take official visits to Stanford, North Carolina and UCLA.
Instead, he recalls attending a camp at Notre Dame the summer before his senior year where, despite holding scholarship offers from Syracuse, Boston College and others, the coaching staff had no idea who he was.
“And then after the first 7-on-7, (offensive coordinator) Bob Davie pulled me aside, he’s like, ‘Hey, where are you from?’” said Coughlin.
In 1996, the internet was still in its infancy. Recruiting junkies could subscribe to a niche publication like SuperPrep, which charged $65 for three issues a year, or Tom Lemming’s Prep Football Report. Or they could call one of the analysts’ 1-900-numbers, which cost $1.49 per minute to listen to the latest updates.
But most fans’ primary exposure to the top high school players in the country came via general-interest outlets like USA Today, which published its weekly top 25 teams and a postseason All-America team; Parade, a weekly magazine tucked inside Sunday newspapers that named its All-Americans and player of the year; or ESPN’s “Scholastic Sports America,” where a young Chris Fowler or future Monday Night Football reporter Melissa Stark toured the country and interviewed the nation’s high school stars.
And most recruits had little idea where they stacked up nationally unless they got mentioned by one of those outlets — most likely during their senior seasons.
“Sports Illustrated had its Faces in the Crowd (column),” said former Virginia and NFL running back Terry Kirby, considered the nation’s No. 1 recruit in 1989, “and I can remember my picture being in there. It was like ‘OK, wow.’
“You had absolutely nothing (else).”
Nearly everything about the way recruiting works has changed since the original iteration of Rivals.com first launched in 1998. Not just for fans, but for the coaches and recruits themselves.
Unlike today, when coaches begin evaluating prospects as high school freshmen, most players did not start getting noticed by recruiters until their junior or even senior seasons. There were no combines or mega-camps full of four- and five-stars.
Former Stanford quarterback Randy Fasani, a native of Loomis, Calif., who graced the cover of SuperPrep as its No. 1 player in 1997, recalls signing up for a Stanford quarterback camp prior to his junior season in an effort to get his name out.
“I entered that camp as a no-name and didn’t know any of the coaches,” he said. “And during the process of a weekend multi-day camp, they moved me from group to group. At the end of the camp, coach Tyrone Willingham called me and my parents up to his office and offered me a full-ride scholarship.”
Today, coaches can pull up Hudl and access game video of nearly any high school player in the nation. Prior to the internet, coaches largely found out who the top players in other regions were by word of mouth. Or by reading Lemming’s magazine Prep Football Report. Because he drove around the country every spring and summer meeting recruits and gathering VHS tapes, Lemming generally had more familiarity with the top prospects than most coaches.
“Throughout the ’80s and ’90s just about every college coach in the country came to my house (in Chicago),” said Lemming, who published his first issue in 1978. “I would have TV monitors in my basement and coaches would come downstairs and just watch a lot of guys on tape. They’d fly into Chicago and they could see 300 or 400 guys in two days.”
As an assistant in the Big 8 in the ’70s and ’80s, future Hall of Fame head coach Jim Donnan recalls sending out questionnaires to high school coaches asking if they had any college-level players that year.
“We tried to look for national guys around the country, but then you had to follow up,” he said. “Some of those schools had spring practice, so you could go watch. Otherwise, send me some film — and it was 8 mm or 16 mm film.”
But it wasn’t just the coaches learning from scratch every year. Often the first time a high school player realized he was a big deal beyond his own city or state was when a guru like Lemming or SuperPrep’s Allen Wallace first contacted them for an interview. Which usually wasn’t until their senior season.
“When I was a sophomore, making the player of the week in the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer was a big deal for me,” said former Ohio State and NFL star Robert Smith, a Euclid, Ohio native. “Because there was no internet, I had no idea it was going national really until my senior year (1989). We (Euclid) played in the first nationally televised high school game against St. Ignatius.”
Not that the big-name recruits didn’t get showered with attention. Handwritten letters from coaches arrived in the mail. Or they’d call your house and have mom hand over the phone. Or they’d show up unannounced at your school.
“I can remember playing basketball and you look up in the stands, you see (Virginia) coach (George) Welsh, you see (Notre Dame’s) Lou Holtz, you see (Alabama’s) Bill Curry, you see (Penn State’s) Joe Paterno,” said Kirby, who ultimately chose Virginia over Clemson.
“(Nebraska’s) Tom Osborne would send some motivational (note) every single day,” said Coughlin, who chose Stanford over North Carolina.
There was no social media, which meant no means for recruits to provide their own updates to fans — top 10 graphics, pictures from campus visits, a slick commitment edit. Though the 1994 Gatorade Player of the Year, future Washington QB Brock Huard, enjoyed something of a print-era precursor to Twitter — he wrote a weekly diary for USA Today during his senior season. A teacher would edit it and fax it into the newspaper for him.
“It was social media before there was ever social media,” said the Fox Sports TV analyst, who chose Washington over UCLA. “I didn’t hold back.”
Huard, now 46, got an up-close window into modern-day recruiting via his nephew, Sam Huard, a five-star QB in the class of 2021 who committed to Washington as a high school sophomore and is heading into his second season with the Huskies.
“I found myself thinking, how would I have processed and handled the chaos of it and the attention of it and the pressure of it?” said Brock Huard. “I was a pretty sensible and analytical guy, and 30 years later I couldn’t imagine being thrust into that situation and handling it.”
The life of a recruit was a lot simpler when the coaches barely knew your name, the newspapers didn’t care enough to write about your every move and the unhealthily obsessed recruiting junkies of America had no message boards on which to rip you.
(Photo of Randy Fasani: Tom Hauck / Allsport)
