Hopes Can Get Tangled In The Web

Did you hear?

The football recruiting laceheads at www.youhavenolifeloser.com have ranked Washington State’s passel of oral commitments as the 38th-best articulated in the nation. It might have been higher, but a couple of recruits decided to e-mail their intentions instead, so they don’t count as strictly oral commitments.

A minor point, sure, but forget what you’ve been told. Recruiting has become a very exact science.

Got a modem? You too can be a scientist.

But spend even one hour on your Pentium checking it out and you can come away blinded by science. Ratings, gurus, commits, de-commits, message-board posturing - gaaack.

Recruiting prattle makes you actually yearn for Super Bowl hype.

Would that today - the first day of the annual letter-of-intent signing period - might bring it to a merciful end, but no such luck. Recruiting is just so much Double Bubble - the flavor passing quickly, but the mouth business keeping you going and going and going.

You know that joke about there being three sports in Texas - football, spring football and recruiting? Well, nowadays, we’re all Texans.

You kin give the Innernit a big ol’ thankee, podna.

This is true even for Wazzu fans, who you’d presume after the past couple of seasons would want to talk football slightly less than they’d want to submit to a barium flush. But they’re chatting it up like mad after a recent surge of commitments, and why not? Seems a few weeks ago, the Cougs were getting told “No” more often than Peter Pocketprotector in search of a prom date.

Today, there will actually be names on the dotted lines and, rumor has it, warm bodies attached to those names.

Still, not to be a spoilsport, but taking anybody’s temperature now is irrelevant.

The question is, will those bodies be warm in four years?

Two years? One?

The latest 10-spot finish in the Pac-10 took some of the glow off, but you may still remember that a couple of the big-time recruitaholics ranked WSU’s 1999 incoming class among the 25 best in the nation. This was an unprecedented stroke for coach Mike Price and the Cougs, and no one blushed when the cyberbased talent hounds who for years had been dismissed by Coug fans as tunnel-visioned tools were suddenly hailed as savants.

Yet even before Wazzu had those dogies in the barn, five had wandered off down the fence line - never to so much as learn the first line of the fight song. Another recruit’s enrollment was delayed. Pre-redshirting, you might call it, a new pet tactic of Price.

Not surprisingly, nobody asked the gurus for a recount on that Top 25 rating.

Everyone is still pretty jazzed about that class, especially after seeing Marcus Trufant cover at cornerback and Deon Burnett slash and dash with the football. But the point is, if five recruits got lopped off the top, how many will survive this snowy Palouse winter, upper-level classes, the ravages of injury or a falling out with a position coach over the next three years?

Didn’t Tevye sing about it in “Fiddler?” Attrition!

It has become the soft shoulder of Cougars football. It is the reason the 1998 season was such a free-fall from the Rose Bowl high, and the reason the Cougars took only a baby step forward competitively in 1999.

It is why Price has some 30-odd scholarships available, though he will dole out maybe 25 today.

The numbers have been cited on-and-off for the last two seasons, and sometime last year it was determined that 40 names once recruited to the roster who could still be suiting up were gone (and this did not even include the class of 1994, easily the most fly-by-night of the past 15 years). The good news is, the last couple of classes have been hanging in a little better.

That attrition was in direct contrast to the class of 1993 - the players who were fifth-year seniors on the Rose Bowl team - in which 13 of 22 incoming freshmen went the distance, supplemented by some outstanding junior college transfers a couple of years later and the best collection of walk-ons Price ever developed.

Indeed, it should be no surprise that Wazzu’s last three bowl teams were blessed with seniors who had staying power. From the 1990 class of 16 freshmen, 10 made it to the Alamo Bowl, along with four 1991 recruits who never redshirted and, again, some great jucos.

Even Dennis Erickson - still excoriated as a lousy recruiter by the sour-grapes bunch hereabouts - had 11 of his 20 freshmen of 1988 in uniform for the 1992 Copper Bowl team coached by Price, plus sixth-year man Bob Garman.

Nobody had any of those groups in some Top 25.

This is not to suggest anyone start doing handsprings over the newest Cougs just because they’re unsung. This may be the kind of class the Cougars almost always get, but possibly even less so.

For one thing, there are 11 junior college transfers among the names who have committed to WSU - not counting the ones who enrolled in December. That means the high school haul will be barely a dozen, and that means another heavy JC transfusion will be likely in a couple of years. And just how many JC game-breakers have panned out lately?

Then there is the academic minefield. Their 40-yard-dash times are all over the chat rooms. Their SAT scores aren’t.

Price was able to do some pretty good posturing during the Rose Bowl run that it wasn’t about recruiting, but development - what happened with the talent once you got it on campus.

He was right. But lately, the biggest problem has been keeping them on line.

Recruits, that is. The fans, they never get off.