Why don't these kids get it?

Historical perspective in sports and elsewhere.

“Don’t they know who we are?”

I love college football more than any sport, but it has more than its share of unseemly undercurrents. To me, the most unsettling of these is recruiting—or, more pointedly, the heavy focus some fans put on their team’s recruiting. There’s a full-fledged industry that’s sprung up around forecasting the life decisions of 17- and 18-year olds, a business model that’s part stock market speculation, part weather forecasting and part astrology. 

Personally, I find it very uncomfortable; I don’t like the idea of grown adults obsessively parsing the decision-making of literal children. I get why it’s a thing; it’s been effectively proven that the level at which a program recruits is directly tied to their ability to compete for a championship. It just skeeves me out. It puts us in a place where 45-year-old men (it’s almost always men) spend time online trying to sweet-talk and/or badger high school students, telling them how much they’ll love Tallahassee or Lexingt…