Kiffin recruiting 7th Graders?????

[Justin_Sans]

As a USC homer, I am all for this. I mean verbal's are meaningless anymore and if they can build up some goodwill around the program with today's youth's it will only help them when it comes to signing there LOI.

Last year, a fairly ridiculous story made the rounds wherein Lane Kiffin, then the new head football coach at Tennessee, reportedly offered a scholarship to 14-year-old Evan Berry, younger brother of UT All-American Eric Berry and soon-to-be high school freshman, who reportedly accepted. Now at USC, Kiffin apparently figured on Thursday that was setting the bar a little too low -- why target eighth-graders, after all, when you can get to them in seventh grade:

According to the Wilmington News Journal, Bear, Del., seventh-grade quarterback David Sills committed Thursday night to accept a football scholarship from USC.

The 13-year-old, who attends Red Lion Christian Academy, told delawareonline.com "my heart was beating so fast" when he talked to Kiffin.

Red Lion high school varsity coach Eric Day confirmed that Kiffin recently offered the teen a scholarship, and that Sills committed, according to the Wilmington paper.

I offer this brief pause to allow you to stop laughing and/or crying. OK, we good?

Onward: Sills is a camp kid, already molded and polished enough to star in at least one earnest promotional video set to a Fountains of Wayne song for his high-priced private coach, Steve Clarkson (or, as he prefers to refer to himself, "Steve Clarkson, Dreammaker"). If he were to eventually join the Trojans, he'd enter as a member of the class of 2015, five full seasons from now. In the meantime, he hopes to pass the seventh and eighth grades and begin studying for his driver's license, among more lurid pursuits.

I maintain, as I did last year when I wrote about the younger Berry, that the usual recruiting parlance of "offers" and "commitments" is rendered virtually meaningless when extended to players too young to have taken a varsity snap. It's almost a contradiction in terms, like a four-sided triangle or something. Coaches aren't allowed to extend official, written scholarship offers until Sept. 1 of a player's junior year in high school -- still three-and-a-half years away for Sills. Even though the scouting process begins much earlier than that for many players, any story that employs the offer/commit language prior to that point is only serving a publicity-seeking sideshow, a grotesquerie of a process that's grotesque enough to begin with. It's no coincidence that both incidents of unabashed middle-school stalking in the past year have been attributed to college football's resident carnival barker, Kiffin, who will push any button for a headline but can't even promise with a straight face that he will be at USC in five years. (Has anyone asked Evan Berry about his "commitment" to Tennessee since Team Kiffin hightailed it for L.A. last month?) That's all Sills' "commitment" is: A weird, slightly disturbing and ultimately empty headline.

In the meantime, USC has landed its first commitment for the class of 2011 from a local player with three seasons of high school play under his belt. That one I'm willing to acknowledge, but in the recruiting business, nothing's in the bank until a signature is on the page.

[moneyball]

The first thing you should know about USC offering a football scholarship to a 13-year-old quarterback is that the NCAA has practically nothing to say about it.

It launched a presidential task force a few years ago to kick around the idea of stopping coaches from offering scholarships to schoolyard players. It even stressed the harmful effects those offers could have on the kids, who might not work as hard afterward.

In the end, it recommended that "an appropriate and complete study should be conducted." In other words, it put the notion to death by committee. The problem for the NCAA, as usual, was enforcement.

So, if the powers that be aren't going to weigh in, and David Sills' parents think it's fine for their son to pick a college before he chooses a high school, and if new USC coach Lane Kiffin thinks he can evaluate a player while his voice is still changing, where does that leave us?

One place it drops us is into a particularly moronic moment in sports history, a time that makes you laugh and feel dirty all at once.

I was feeling as though I needed to take a shower after mulling Sills' verbal commitment, which was first leaked to ESPN's Shelley Smith by Sills' private quarterback coach, Steve Clarkson.

Clarkson, by the way, charges attendees of his camps $750 a pop, according to his Web site. That's nothing compared with what he has collected over the years from the parents of his star pupils, who have included Matt Barkley, Jimmy Clausen and Ben Roethlisberger.

Maybe somebody could clear it up for me. Is football recruiting turning into AAU basketball? It's always had its dark side, but this seems to have taken it into a new area, one that might involve children's welfare. Why is it always Kiffin pushing recruiting into these dark, shady places? What does he have to gain from Sills' story coming out now?

I decided to check with a couple of the most prominent high school coaches in Southern California, guys who have gone deep into the recruiting process with the game's elite prospects. Bruce Rollinson coached Barkley at Mater Dei in Santa Ana. Bill Redell coached Clausen at Oaks Christian Academy in Westlake Village. They both seemed perplexed by this story.

Rollinson said he could tell when Barkley was in seventh grade that he was going to be something special, so I asked him how he would have reacted if the kid had gotten a scholarship offer back in 2004.

"I think I would have felt the same way I feel today, just, 'You've got to be kidding me. You're serious?'" Rollinson said. Redell could tell Clausen had Division I potential when he was 15. The recruitment began at the end of Clausen's sophomore year, and coaches were finding subtle ways to show their interest. In the last four or five years, Redell said, universities have been evaluating and making offers to younger and younger players.

He has dozens of schools ready to offer scholarships to his sophomore receiver Jordan Payton.

"To be honest with you, I think the whole thing's out of whack," Redell said. "There's so much money involved today, so many jobs at stake, that they're identifying guys in the seventh and eighth grades. I don't mean to say the staffs at USC and UCLA are going to Pop Warner games, but they're getting wind of guys way early."

As recently as a few years ago, Pete Carroll wouldn't offer scholarships to juniors. When he realized that could dent his USC empire, which had been built largely by recruiting prowess, he relented. Now, apparently, Kiffin is taking things about as far as they can logically go. But he's not alone. Redell said most elite players' recruiting is practically wrapped up during their junior years.

[moneyball]

Maybe in a few years, my 3-year-old will have enough arm strength to catch somebody's eye.

Most of the big-time programs rely on scouting services to feed them tape of elite young players. Private instructors like Clarkson seem to be proliferating. It's a bit reminiscent of how the Eastern bloc countries used to control the Olympics. Identify an athletic kid with sturdy legs; get him or her expert instruction in an academy; and voilà, you've got a gold-medal ski jumper six years later. Never mind that the kid had to live a regimented life away from his family and friends.

Redell is in the business of coaching younger kids than Kiffin coaches, but he won't watch tapes of sixth- and seventh-graders, even though people send him about two per week. Apparently, Kiffin isn't so discriminating.

Maybe it all boils down to Kiffin's supreme belief in his own recruiting abilities. He's so sure he's right about Sills (after watching one tape, according to Clarkson) that he's willing to ignore the myriad possibilities the intervening five years could bring. Supposing Sills, who is 6 feet tall, doesn't grow another inch? Supposing he decides he wants to be a concert violinist and loses interest in football?

Or, heaven forbid, what if he gets seriously hurt? Oh wait, that part's easy: Kiffin can just withdraw the scholarship. "You hear guys say, 'I can look at a kid and tell if he has the 'it' factor,'" Rollinson said. "I'm not sure if you can tell if a kid has the 'it' factor at 13 years old.

[moneyball]

I know what my 12 year old son will be reading tonight.....

[IrishFanAtic]

Good stuff Moneyball Kiffin just keeps us rolling our eyes: all I can say is
WHAT WILL HE DO NEXT???

[moneyball]

He's offering a scholarship to a 12-year-old girl to become a cheerleader

[Justin_Sans]

MB, I agree with your above statement. Kids are starting the recruiting process younger and younger. Once a kid signs with a big time school Florida, USC, Ohio State, Texas, etc. he is not a student athlete, he is a athlete student. Athletics come first in everything, that is why you see classes that have 4 regular students and 28 student athletes.

Also, by having a early enrolled student he can be there for spring ball. The flip side to that is that the player has loses out on all the cool stuff he would do if he were a senior at a high school. Senior skip day or walking around school all day with no books. The kid stuff that a lot do that early enrollees miss out on may be the reason why some students have a difficult time socializing.

[desi]

my niece is pregnant and the kid has
a huge arm in the pics we've seen. well
we think it's an arm. i was thinking either
a q.b. or a porn star. either way he should
be recruited in the next 4 months.

[Justin_Sans]

Originally Posted by desi

my niece is pregnant and the kid has
a huge arm in the pics we've seen. well
we think it's an arm. i was thinking either
a q.b. or a porn star. either way he should
be recruited in the next 4 months.