With National Signing Day 2015 officially in the books, it’s easy for students and fans to glorify their school’s fresh crop of high school athletes as the “saviors” of their program.
It’s even easier to blast athletes for decisions that don’t align with what those fans hoped for.
Highly recruited high schoolers like Daylon Mack and JF Thomas chose colors other than purple and white on Wednesday, but that isn’t an excuse to send them offensive tweets or messages. At the end of the day, they made a call like so many athletes before them made.
(Also on TCU 360: Football signs 21 commits for 2015 signing class)
Let’s also not forget what TCU football head coach Gary Patterson seems to mention every National Signing Day: high school players are nothing more than “paper tigers” until they take the field on Saturdays.
Junior running back Aaron Green took to Twitter over the weekend to discuss this very subject.
These High School recruits mislead y’all with tweets on purpose so they can feel special about themselves when y’all go crazy
— Aaron Green (@AaronGreen22) January 29, 2015
The thing is half of them won’t even amount to anything when they get to college with that attitude. #Humility #TCU
— Aaron Green (@AaronGreen22) January 29, 2015
For every high school stud that lives up to the hype, guys like Texas A&M’s Myles Garrett and LSU’s Leonard Fournette, there are also hundreds of players that fade out of the public eye quicker than they stepped into the limelight.
In early 2012, Longhorns running back Daje Johnson flipped his commitment from TCU to the University of Texas late in the recruiting game, and fans made it seem like the sky was falling for the Horned Frogs.
Three years later, TCU is at the top of the college football world while the former four-star running back has rushed for less than 500 yards in his three years with the struggling Longhorns.
Heisman finalist Trevone Boykin was a three-star prospect coming out of high school, receiving offers from only two schools to play quarterback: UTEP and TCU. On paper, he wasn’t projected to succeed. But he did.
(VIDEO: TCU News Now weekly newscast for February 4, 2015)
To that point, athletes are human. As fun as it is to boil them down to statistics and projections, let’s not forget to remember the person inside each of those helmets. Imagine if every move someone made during his or her college selection process was poked and prodded at.
While it’s certainly entertaining to overanalyze every tweet a 17-year-old kid sends out or mull through hours of film to guess how he’ll “translate to the next level,” don’t hate the kid for making a decision for reasons one may never know.
Life is about making decisions and living with those decisions. The amount of stars behind a person’s name doesn’t change that or what happens on the field on Saturdays.
Managing Editor Jordan Ray for the editorial board.
