During their campus visits, recruits typically tour not only football facilities but academic ones. Coaches are as likely to shoot the breeze as to draw Xs and Os on a whiteboard, hoping to make recruits — and their families — feel like their college is a suitable home-away-from-home.
Steve Ognenovic — whose son Nikolas, a tight end, posed alongside his father at Pitt and Kentucky before signing with the latter — recalled a long visit with Auburn Coach Gus Malzahn. “We spent 20 minutes talking about football,” Ognenovic said. “The rest was about the new addition on his deck, the truck he bought. He’s a regular guy.”
The trend can also be a way for coaches to signal to recruits, present and future, what kind of program they are running. For instance, Florida’s second-year head coach, Dan Mullen, appears intent on reintroducing to Gainesville the kind of whimsy one expects from a team whose fans do a gator-chop on game days.
In contrast, a Tennessee assistant coach recently spoke out against the practice, tweeting that one of the things he prays for was “that I NEVER have to outfit someone’s dad in full gear for a photo shoot.” It is not shocking that the assistant first worked with Tennessee’s head coach, Jeremy Pruitt, when both were on the staff of Alabama’s supremely buttoned-up Nick Saban, whose recruits are probably less likely to pose alongside mom or dad.
So why do some kids and parents want these photographs, which may be compelling but are also a little bit absurd? And why do they make heavy rotation on social media and in the sports blogosphere?
The photos are a reminder of the human dimension in college football’s annual meat market. For all the hoopla over which program has signed the best class (spoiler: yet again, it will probably be Alabama) and which team whiffed on a prized in-state offensive lineman, often overlooked is how big a day this is for the prospects themselves, who, like so many other adolescents who are less gifted on the gridiron, are finally completing the large and much-celebrated process of deciding where to go to college.
Steve Snyder said that, when a Missouri coach asked if he wanted to put a jersey on, “I thought to myself, how many opportunities am I ever going to get to have an experience like this with my son?”
His son ended up signing with Baylor, and, Snyder said, friends and family had already loaded up on Bears gear. “You’re very proud parents,” he said. “Lot of hard work.”
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