Recruiting junkies get annual fix

BATON ROUGE, La. – There are still three shopping days left until Christmas, if you’re a recruiting junkie.

Christmas – also known as national signing day – arrives on Wednesday. The junkies can’t wait for it to come. Their loved ones, like Kim Hebert of Baton Rouge, can’t wait for it to be over.

“My wife thinks we’re a bunch of geeks, looking at the Web sites every night,” said Baton Rouge dentist Tom Hebert. “But hey, she watches ‘Desperate Housewives.’ So she can’t give me too much grief. I have toned it down since I got married. But I still check it (the internet) every night. She just doesn’t understand the interest. She rips us up about it.”

Larry Aycock and Mike “Chinese Bandit” Bernard of Lafayette and Hebert are three people with real jobs whose real passion is LSU football recruiting.

“I’m usually on it 30 minutes a night,” Hebert said. “During the heat of recruiting season, like now, 45 minutes to an hour, tops.”

He sounded like he was trying to be convincing.

Hebert has to work on Wednesday, but in between teeth cleaning, guess where he’ll be.

“I’ll make a few phone calls, I’m sure,” he said. “I don’t want any surprises.”

During this time of year, Aycock says he is “on” from 7 p.m. when he gets off of work to about 10 p.m.

“My wife’s used to it, I think,” said Aycock, who is in business for himself.

“I have to go get on right now,” Bernard said at 11:30 p.m. Friday on his way home from a prep basketball game. “This time of year, I might be on it four to six hours a day.”

Bernard is single and runs an office supply company with his father.

Bernard has been putting in overtime – with his passion – in recent weeks because of the LSU coaching change from Nick Saban to Les Miles.

“After the last few years of Saban, I didn’t bother with it, because he was doing so well and I didn’t have to worry,” Bernard said. “Now with the coaching change, we’ve lost a lot of guys. So I’m keeping up more.”

LSU has lost three commitments and many others whom it felt would likely commit since Saban left to coach the Miami Dolphins. Miles expects to sign 16 or 18 on Wednesday. He is hosting Ryan Perrilloux, the nation’s No. 1 prep quarterback out of East St. John High, this weekend.

“I hope we can get Ryan Perrilloux,” Aycock said. “We need a shot in the arm. The good news is we don’t have to sign 25 because of all the players coming back. This is also a down year in the state for talent, so if a coaching change had to happen I think this is probably the best time.”

Hebert pointed out that Saban lost several recruits in his first year when he replaced Gerry DiNardo after the 1999 season. One was Laurel, Miss., quarterback Jason Campbell, who started for the South in the Senior Bowl on Saturday after directing Auburn to a 13-0 season.

“Les needs a complete year,” Hebert said. “We can’t judge him yet. It would be unfair. He did recruit well at Oklahoma State. I don’t think it’s going to be a problem.”

But just in case, he’ll be monitoring the Web sites and the phones. Wednesday is not the end of the fun for the recruiting enthusiast. It really just represents another beginning. Recruiting never ends. There’s not a 12-step program it can’t beat.

Lafayette’s Mike Scarborough, a recruiting analyst and publisher of TigerBait.com, is the enabler of our three friends, and he rarely lets up.

“Mike has stuff on his Web site in July,” Hebert said. “Usually, Nick Saban would have guys identified by the summer and he’d start getting commitments. You have to look at the juniors heading into their senior year. That’s what we’ll do next.”

All can trace their habit back to the time they were hooked. For Bernard, it was the courtship of Carencro running back Kevin Faulk, a national recruit who signed with new LSU coach DiNardo in 1995.

“I did high school football on the radio and had a show on Wednesday nights when Kevin Faulk was still in high school,” Bernard said. “I always wanted him to go to LSU. When you see a kid you know become a national recruit, it’s really something.”

Aycock traces his interest to the beginning of major recruiting coverage in newspapers, which was the early 1980s. This coincided with the hiring of Jerry Stovall as LSU’s coach before the 1980 season. Stovall took the job talking about recruiting and delivered.

“At some point you realize, if you don’t keep up with it, you can’t expect to just have a good team every year,” Aycock said. “If not, you’re kind of fooling yourself if you just think they’ll be good. It was about this same time that Max Emfinger started his newsletter, and I was hooked. If you don’t have some kind of an educated premonition of how your team might be, you’re spinning your head during the season.”

Aycock also has friends in recruiting places, like Scarborough and Dandy Don of LSU Web site fame.

“I’ve known both of those guys for a long time, and recruiting is all they want to talk about,” Aycock said. “So how can you not be talking about it? All Scarborough does is talk to people on the phone about recruiting. I’d love to have his job.”

Recruiting helped Hebert get through the dark years of LSU football – the six straight losing seasons from 1989 through 1994 under coaches Mike Archer and Curley Hallman.

“All of a sudden, we’re getting killed on the football field,” Hebert said. “That’s when I realized that recruiting is the No. 1 reason why you win or lose.”