Friday Fodder: Super hype for signing day?

Sports fodder for a Friday morning ... College football's National Letter of Intent signing day has officially gotten out of control. High school kids are conducting press conferences (real and fake) announcing their college choices. National magazines are putting high school recruits on their covers. National television networks are grilling overwhelmed teenagers on the air, asking them where they are going to college. Even the Nevada Wolf Pack found it necessary to conduct a signing day party for the public Wednesday night at a local sports bar. Coaches get behind podiums, sounding like used car salesmen trying to unload the last 1999 Toyota on the lot, and tell the world how amazing and outstanding each and every one of their two dozen recruits will be and how all of them expressed undying love for their new university. We all buy into the hype and, yes, we can't get enough of it. It's not college athletics anymore. It's professional wrestling.

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Three years ago a misguided Northern Nevada high school player, wearing a white shirt and tie, sat in a gymnasium filled with well-wishers, friends, family, reporters and television cameras with the caps of two major universities in front of him. He sat there, paused for drama's sake, placed one of the caps on his head and the gym erupted in applause like he just nailed a triple Salchow in the Olympics. He later admitted the whole scene was as staged and as artificial as the drama club's latest presentation of Our Town. That ugly and sad incident should have made us all sit up and take notice. But, unfortunately, it's like the whole thing never happened. What, exactly, are we finding out on signing day? Isn't it just a bunch of unknown names, bogus ratings and evaluations and inflated heights and weights on a sheet of paper? What, were you worried your favorite university's football team couldn't find two dozen kids to accept their scholarship offer and would have to play next season with a bunch of kids from the chess club?

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According to one high school coach, the Wolf Pack pulled a scholarship offer off the table from a recruit just days before signing day even after the athlete made a verbal commitment to them months ago. The athlete made his official visit to Nevada just last week and supposedly felt even better about his decision to join the Pack. Nevada, according to the recruit's high school coach, then called the athlete after he got back home and said he no longer had an offer. It's just a sad commentary on big-time football. And you really can't blame the Wolf Pack. The pressure to win is simply devouring coaches and universities these days. The more you win, after all, the more money you make for your university. A better athlete became available to the Pack late in the recruiting process and the Pack, according to coach Chris Ault, "had to make a tough decision." Sad. But until ESPN starts to televise signing day for the chess club instead of football, it will only get uglier and sadder.

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This isn't a real Super Bowl, is it? Where's the old American Football League team? The Super Bowl is supposed to be the NFL against the AFL, right? Green Bay and Pittsburgh are old NFL teams. The Super Bowl's defining moment was when the New York Jets beat the Baltimore Colts in 1969. That was supposed to prove once and for all that the upstart AFL could play with the stodgy, old, traditional NFL. Well, it hasn't happened. This will be the third consecutive Super Bowl without an original AFL team. Original AFL teams have won just 12 of the first 44 Super Bowls and just five (thanks to Denver and New England) of the last 26. That's probably why the winner this Super will be handed the Vince Lombardi Trophy and not the Al Davis Trophy.

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The original AFL franchises have fallen on hard times in the last two decades. Miami hasn't been to a Super Bowl since 1985. Kansas City hasn't made an appearance since 1970. Oakland has been to just one since 1984. The Jets have made just one memorable appearance four decades ago. Buffalo hasn't been around the roman numeral game since 1994. The Houston Oilers (as the Tennessee Titans in 2000) and San Diego Chargers (1995) have only been to one Super Bowl each. Cincinnati has made it to two (1982, 1989). New England, which went to six Super Bowls from 1986-2008, and Denver, which went to six from 1978-1999, are the only original AFL franchises to keep up with the NFL since the Internet took over our lives.

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Bill Belichick won the Associated Press' Coach of the Year award this week and Troy Polamalu won Defensive Player of the Year. Both awards should have gone to somebody else. Chicago's Julius Peppers and Green Bay's Clay Matthews are more important to their teams and had better seasons than Polamalu. Tampa Bay's Raheem Morris, Philadelphia's Andy Reid, Kansas City's Todd Haley and Chicago's Lovie Smith all should have been given the coach award over boring Bill. If the Associated Press doesn't shape up, the NFL will replace it with the BCS.

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The Wolf Pack basketball team scored its fewest points in nearly 10 years Wednesday night in a 67-45 loss at Utah State. The last time it scored fewer points was in a 58-40 loss at Hawaii on Dec. 29, 2001. The last time the Pack scored fewer points on the mainland was in a 60-44 loss to Rice in the WAC Tournament in Tulsa, Okla., on March 6, 2001. So don't worry too much about what happened Wednesday night. The WAC Tournament in March won't be in either Hawaii, Tulsa or Logan, Utah. It will be in Las Vegas. The Pack hasn't scored as few as 45 points in the state of Nevada (Reno or Las Vegas) since a 49-40 loss to UC Davis on Feb. 24, 1967, in Reno, just 40 days after the first Super Bowl.