STARKVILLE — One talks with his family, visits schools, and picks a college
It often is one of the biggest choices teenagers make as they become adults.
For some, that’s when things only start to get interesting.
A decision and a verbal commitment to a school sometimes doesn’t end the recruiting process. As a result, 17- to 18-year-old prospects who expected the process to stop once they made their decisions then have to wade through phone calls and questions from other schools that test their resolve.
This is the world 12 student-athletes who have pledged their services to the Mississippi State University football program live in because they made their decision sooner than others.
Most of the 12 highly coveted student-athletes are caught in a world where verbal commitments are described as “hard” and “soft” and a word like “decommit” is used more and more in the recruiting process.
Recruiting is a 24-hour, 12-month, 365-day process for high school seniors that ends in February when many sign a non-legal document called a National Letter of Intent.
The moment when those recruits sign the NLI is the only time that MSU coach Dan Mullen feels certain a player will end up on his roster.
“I guess a commitment in my mind, and maybe the media’s mind, is very different,” Mullen said last year on national signing day. “A commitment in my mind is someone coming to Mississippi State and not taking a visit. If you’re visiting other places, I never considered you committed in the first place.”
At least two of the 12 players in the Class of 2013 who have given verbal commitments to MSU spoke to The Dispatch on Friday night while they were at the 2012 Big Dawg Camp. Those two players said they want the contact to stop — the sooner, the better.
Kailo Moore, a four-star running back from West Bolivar High School in Rosedale, told The Dispatch he has felt pressure from competing coaches and the public for more than a month since he announced his intention to attend MSU.
“Everybody is still pressuring me and telling me I shouldn’t have committed to MSU, but I just knew I wanted to come here,” Moore said. “I’m totally committed to Mississippi State and my decision. They sealed the deal.”
Rivals.com rates Moore, a 5-foot-11, 190-pound tailback, the 12th-best running back in the nation. He also is one of the nation’s fastest timed players, and is rated the second-best prospect in the state of Mississippi. Moore won the Class 2A state championship in the 100-meter dash with a time of 10.41 seconds and, according to his Twitter page, he was timed Friday at 4.25 seconds in the 40-yard dash.
That world-class speed has coaches still calling Moore despite his verbal pledge to the Bulldogs.
“(The coaches) are still pressuring me every day, and even today because a while ago I got a (message) on Twitter from (University of Mississippi coach) Hugh Freeze telling me to call him even though I’m here,” Moore said. “They’ve still pressuring me and recruiting me hard.”
NCAA rules don’t prohibit contact from coaches to student-athletes who have given a verbal commitment to a school, but the recruiting tactic is frowned upon and has led to many rivalries between coaches in and out of the Southeastern Conference.
“I can tell you this,” University of Wisconsin coach Bret Bielema said. “We at the Big Ten don’t want to be like the SEC — in any way, shape, or form.”
During his 2011 signing day press conference in February, Bielema hinted former University of Florida coach Urban Meyer, who is the new coach at Ohio State University, was using “illegal” recruiting practices by recruiting and signing players on signing day who had committed to Wisconsin
“There are a few things that happened early on I made people aware of I didn’t want to see in this league I had seen take place in other leagues,” Bielema told CBS Chicago in February. “Other recruiting tactics, other recruiting practices that are illegal. I was very up front and was very pointed to the fact, actually reached out to coach Meyer and shared my thoughts and concerns with him. The situation got rectified.”
The main reason coaches continue to call student-athletes who have given verbal commitments is those players don’t always follow through on their decisions in February.
“You take a job, you’re going to check your in-state players to see if they’re interested,” Meyer said to ESPN.com in response to Bielema’s accusations. “If they are, then come on now, let’s talk about it. If they’re not … The young man up at St. Edward (offensive lineman Kyle Kalis, who signed with Michigan) we asked (and) he said, ‘I’m solid, I’m good’, (so) we said, ‘Good luck’ and we moved on. I didn’t call him again.”
Last February, MSU lost six commitments in the last month, including several highly ranked prospects, according to the recruiting services. Those decisions left MSU with a recruiting class that was ranked near the bottom of the SEC.
“A lot of people are going to get up and preach about what their program is and when they get there the guys all of the sudden realize it is something very different,” Mullen said. “You’re very excited when guys look and you talk about being the best you can be, wanting to work hard, and make commitments and sacrifice.”
B.J. Hammond, a 6-foot-4 wide receiver from Gadsden, Ala., agreed with Moore the pressure from a school in your hometown can test your verbal commitment. Hammond, a three-star prospect, didn’t want to wait for a late scholarship offer from the University of Alabama or Auburn University, which is why on June 6 he pledged his services to Mullen.
“I went home and everybody said to me, ‘Oh man, you picked them over your in-state schools and going on about this traitor stuff,’ ” Hammond said Friday after working out at the Big Dawg Camp in Starkville. “It’s more than about picking a school. It’s about family and are the people there committed to you?”
The local pressure caused South Panola High lineman Deon Mix, a four-star recruit, to admit he had been dishonest about his recruiting status for months and he didn’t want his commitment to trigger a backlash from his hometown of Batesville, an area Ole Miss has traditionally dominated.
“I just told (MSU coach Dan Mullen) I was ready to be a Bulldog,” Mix said June 11. “I was just hiding it. I’ve been knowing where I’m going for a long time because I didn’t want it out there for everybody to know.”
So while college football fans continue to wait until February to determine if the area’s top prospects will attend their schools, the student-athletes who make the verbally commitments want the calls to stop.
“What I hope my commitment did was allow others to feel comfort in knowing they can stand up and say they want to come here, too,” Hammond said. “I talked to (MSU verbal commit DeAndre Woods from Pinson Valley, Ala.) and he told me he already knew where he wanted to go, but when I committed it gave him somebody to stand up with and say, ‘I’m going to go there despite where everybody else wants me to go.’ “
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