As sure as the raindrops fall from the overcast sky and splash off his helmet, Tyler Roehl of Sandburg High wants to play college football. The question for months has been how badly college football wants him.
Blue-chippers get truckloads of recruiting love letters dumped at their door. But 6-foot-1-inch, 260-pound defensive tackles have to get creative.
Or at least older brothers with experience, free time and a hard drive do. Last spring Tyler’s brother Jeff, a former Northwestern offensive lineman, downloaded game tapes to a DVD-creating program. The film was edited, copied and sent to scads of Midwest schools.
Number of schools that asked for the DVDs: Zero. Number of players like Tyler Roehl, eager to crash the recruiting game: More than you know.
“The more publicity you have, the better,” Roehl said while stretching before a recent Sandburg practice. “The more colleges that know about you, the better.
“I have no idea where I’m going to be playing college football. But I definitely plan to.”
Mike Sabock says Northern Illinois receives about six unsolicited videos a day. At Northwestern, recruiting coordinator Pat Fitzgerald’s “conservative estimate” is 10 to 15 a week.
No longer do recruiting coordinators receive only the tapes requested from a high school coach. If you’re in charge of wooing Johnny, prepare for some amateur John Woos.
“Many more kids think they’re worthy of scholarships–simply because it’s more visible on the Internet,” said Sabock, the Huskies’ recruiting coordinator. “We get [tapes] from local kids, but we get them from all over–Canada, California. We’ll look at them. Most of the time they’re not good enough. But every now and then we find a tape.”
Putting yourself out there
Easy access to recruiting Web sites that glorify the process and college football’s vast TV exposure spurred the phenomenon. The majority of the P.R.-savvy are players on the fringe, perceived to be an inch too short, a step too slow, a few pounds underweight.
The idea is, if just given a look, they could make up that inch and prove their worth. So Roehl ships homemade DVDs to Big Ten and Mid-American Conference schools.
Hinsdale Central’s James Lill uses a service that compiles highlight tapes and sends them to Division I and I-AA colleges. Providence’s Jordan Farrell sends one tape out, and probably will follow with another.
“I know about five or six kids on the team who are doing their own work,” said Lill, a 6-1, 265-pound defensive tackle. “There’s such a large pool, if you don’t make a name for yourself, you probably won’t get attention.”
The 5-10, 182-pound Farrell said: “If I can open doors to bigger colleges, I felt, why not? I just love the game.”
How often is the feeling mutual? Greg Eslinger, smallish and largely overlooked in Bismarck, N.D., sent an unsolicited tape to Minnesota. Four years later he’s an All-American center. Brian Heinz, snubbed by home-state Colorado and Colorado State, sent a tape to Northwestern and would be a second-year starter at safety for NU were it not for injury.
They are reasons to be hopeful as well as exceptions to the rule.
“A lot of kids who have to self-promote, more often than not, they wind up not getting something,” Sandburg coach Marty Balle said.
Indeed, even if self-promoting players get a sniff from Division I, they typically wind up as walk-ons, like Heinz. More often they land at levels from I-AA down.
“If he was that good, you probably know about him,” Northwestern’s Fitzgerald said. “My primary [recruiting] area outside of Chicago is Houston. If I get a film from down there, and I don’t know a lot about the player, I kind of say, `What?'”
The players who are most realistic about the targets of self-promotion will find the most success. As Hinsdale Central coach Tony Lombardi notes, smaller schools don’t have nationwide recruiting nets, and anyone interesting only costs a coach a phone call’s worth of time as a follow-up.
“At first, I had some big hopes,” said 6-1, 180-pound Sandburg running back Mike Anthony. “But … I’m not 6-foot-1, 200 pounds like all Division I running backs are.”
The objective: Notice
The thing is, Division I coaches watch.
A grass-roots recruiting video may not be the first into the mouth of the VCR. But unearthing diamonds in the rough is part of coaches’ livelihoods. How can they not watch?
“We take a look at that stuff very seriously,” Fitzgerald said. “The only mistake we make is not watching it. It may not be the first film I pop in. Matter of fact, I know it won’t be the first film I pop in. But I’ll watch it.”
The flood of films from these makeshift studios has hardly crested. And the mix of hope and an overzealous approach often may foster disappointment.
Merely a sliver of optimism, however, will continue to carry the players to the post office, tapes and dreams in hand.
“In the end,” Lombardi said, “if the kid is happy where he’s placed and has a good experience, who cares?”
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bchamilton@tribune.com
