Columnist Ron Kantowski: Only time will tell with football recruits

Thursday, Feb. 5, 2004 | 10:06 a.m.

Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4088.

If you listened to the rhetoric being spewed by college football coaches on national signing day for high school recruits Wednesday, even Whoer U. and Disco Tech got their men. I have yet to hear a coach -- not even at some place like Baylor -- open a news conference by saying he had a worse recruiting class than the Iraqi Army.

Coaches fibbing about Jim Bob Phenom's speed in the 40 is just one of the irritating things about signing day. Another is how these recruiting geeks -- er, experts -- can meaningfully rank a school's recruits before any of them have played a single down.

In terms of an inexact science, judging football recruiting classes on the basis of their high school statistics and 40-yard dash speeds has to rank right up there with determining the boiling point of Beryllium.

In that most of us last fired a Bunsen burner in high school chemistry lab, perhaps a better way to judge recruits is to review their contributions four years after they sign. Kind of like the NCAA does with graduation rates, only without all the bellyaching from Bob Huggins.

So instead of predicting how John Robinson's 2004 recruiting class might pan out, perhaps we should be looking back at how his 2000 signees did pan out.

So in alphabetical order, here goes:

So of those 23, I'd say that 13 were significant contributors. Maybe that translates to a C. Given that Brimmer, Palepoi, Seward and Claridge turned out to be blue-chip types, you could justify bumping that up to a B-minus.

As for my take on the class of 2004, well, how about getting back to me in about 2008?