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Texas Recruiting Notes 2023: Strippers, Monkeys, and 5-Stars

Machinator

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Born Burnt
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49 in Sept.  It sucks - went from jogging and a swimmer to tremors and shakes.  I'm scared to death of fixing a light bulb on a ladder.  I just pray it isn't MS.  Neither have a blood test, it takes t

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I know it feels like cool shit is happening, but Surly needs to gear all the fucking way up. Big big things coming. Let’s.Fucking.Go!

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USNALonghorn

USNALonghorn 5155

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2 hours ago, Red Five said:

Moore reminds me of someone and I can't place it. I'm afraid it's one of those OU WRs that have torched us sometime in the past.

Oh so Juaqiuin Iglesias…

Or Ryan Broyles?

Kenny Stills

Dede Westbrook
Marquise Brown
Ceedee Lamb

Charleston Rambo
Marvin Mims

Too many to pick from.

Edited by USNALonghorn
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Yesh

Yesh 961

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27 minutes ago, Hookem2147 said:

Gerry on Derek Williams

Inside Texas still believes there is a chance On3 Consensus 4-star safety Derek Williams signs his NLI Wednesday.

IT spoke with a family member earlier this morning. The response to the question was, "You will just have to wait and see until tomorrow."

IT also spoke with a person at Westgate High in New Iberia, and the answer was "it could go either way"

CTJ our machine gun needs a reload

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Chuckie Finster

Chuckie Finster 22978

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32 minutes ago, Hookem2147 said:

Gerry on Derek Williams

Inside Texas still believes there is a chance On3 Consensus 4-star safety Derek Williams signs his NLI Wednesday.

IT spoke with a family member earlier this morning. The response to the question was, "You will just have to wait and see until tomorrow."

IT also spoke with a person at Westgate High in New Iberia, and the answer was "it could go either way"

There are a number of reasons I could never be a college coach, but shit like this would absolutely make me want to walk into traffic.

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Bodacious Bevo

Bodacious Bevo 3687

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On 12/18/2022 at 10:28 AM, Dbeasy said:

He was referring to a BO&W comment yesterday, bagging on Wisner. And Wisner was solid in the championship game yesterday lining up at WR, the slot, HBack, and RB. I think he got the MVP.

With that said, he may not fit real well for Texas if they need a prototypical RB. As a replacement for K. Robinson? Maybe, but he doesn’t have the speed of Robinson. I still liked his play yesterday though. 

Bit late on this. Keilan filled the motion guy role for us this year but I don't think they'll recruit a RB/APB type for that. At Bama Sark used Jeudy, Waddle, Smith, and Metchie for that. Personally I think Niblett could be incredible there. 

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Codaxx

Codaxx 6214

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7 minutes ago, BornAndRaised said:

If the only flip is deandre Moore I'll be slightly disappointed. Feels like the commits are hyping it. Although I guess pimpton is considered a flip too

Happy to get Moore, Pimpton, and Akana, but none of those guys will move Texas up. They seem to be hinting at something bigger, but I am going to ignore that. I need to protect my fragile heart. 

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Teryor

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4 minutes ago, Codaxx said:

Happy to get Moore, Pimpton, and Akana, but none of those guys will move Texas up. They seem to be hinting at something bigger, but I am going to ignore that. I need to protect my fragile heart. 

We do this every year. They get this excited for basically every dude who's committing.

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NoName

NoName 17107

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Dumping this here because it makes the most sense

Article: Before college football recruiting websites, 900 numbers fed die-hard fans’ needs

 

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Before college football recruiting websites, 900 numbers fed die-hard fans’ needs

Audrey Snyder
Dec 20, 2022

23

In the weeks leading up to college football’s national signing day in the late 1980s, there were problems at GatorBait headquarters. David Stirt, the publisher of the weekly Florida Gators newspaper that he started in 1980, had three telephone lines that he and his staff would use to call high school coaches and players.

 

An essential part of any reporter’s job became difficult thanks to Florida fans who kept clogging the lines.

“It had gotten so out of hand with recruiting in terms of people wanting information that they couldn’t wait until the paper came out every week,” Stirt said. “We couldn’t get any of our work done ourselves finding out what was going on in recruiting because the lines were always tied up.”

Out of necessity to get his phone lines back, Stirt racked his brain for a solution. He was intrigued when he stumbled upon an advertisement for 900 numbers, which allowed callers to pay $1 or more per minute to listen to a recorded voice on the other end of the line. He started hearing about churches using 900 numbers for fundraisers and other 900 numbers being established for trivia contests.

“I thought these were always for porn,” Stirt said. “I was like, ‘What’s going on with 900 numbers?’”

He wasn’t alone.

“A 900 number has only one connotation and it’s awful,” said Bill King, a longtime sports talk radio host in Nashville. “You know, it’s call-in porn.”

In January 1990, Stirt called Advanced Telecom Services, a company in Pennsylvania. He told them he was interested in launching a 900 number to serve as a college football recruiting hotline. The premise was simple: Fans would call his 900 number and hear a recorded message that spanned five minutes in length. They’d get the most up-to-date recruiting information they desired for $1.99 for the first minute and then $1 for each minute after that. He could update the contents of the message daily.

“They said, ‘Are you sure this is something that’s really that important?’” Stirt recalled. “I said, well, in the South college football is religion, and recruiting is right there.”

Stirt had one subscriber living in Saudi Arabia who paid an extra $100 just to have GatorBait mailed to him as quickly as possible. That same man once called Stirt on signing day because he needed to know the latest on Florida’s signing class and couldn’t wait for the paper to arrive.

 

“There were jets flying overhead that I could hear all while he’s on the phone talking recruiting!” Stirt said. “… This is the ultimate recruitnik. The ultimate fanatic.”

By Feb. 1, 1990 — just weeks ahead of Steve Spurrier’s first signing day at Florida, and 12 years before Rivals.com published its first rankings — Stirt’s 900 number was established. He promoted it in his weekly publication and advertised it in newspapers throughout the state. He equated it to someone paying for first-class mail as opposed to standard delivery. If they wanted to wait until the weekly paper arrived, the same recruiting information would be in there. If they needed the latest recruiting scoop, the 900 number was a way to get their fix.

The phone line was a roaring success. GatorBait received over 3,000 calls and netted $10,000 in revenue on national signing day alone, Stirt said. By the end of February — with more than 10,000 calls and close to $40,000 in revenue — Stirt was on to something.

“I was the first,” Stirt said with a laugh. “I started the whole 900 recruiting business.”

College football recruiting hotlines became a go-to information source with newspaper reporters and recruiting insiders, launching a medium that skyrocketed in popularity in the early-to-mid 1990s. Phone companies took a percentage of the revenue, but it still left many with a lucrative new opportunity that predated reliable internet service and the explosion of recruiting coverage online via networks like Rivals, Scout and 247Sports.

When Advanced Telecom approached King about starting a college football recruiting hotline in 1991, he had his reservations. At the urging of his fiancée, who’s now his wife, he agreed to start one. His radio show already discussed recruiting, and he publicized his office phone number, which led to frequent calls from fans who were desperate for recruiting intel.

 

What could a 900 number hurt?

“My first check after Advanced Telecom got their money and whoever else, the phone company, it was $45,000 — for one month,” said King, whose biochemistry degree left many of his family members questioning why in the world he wanted to go into radio. “(My parents) came over to take us out to eat one night, we had an apartment and I did not do this on purpose, but that check was sitting on the counter. One of them saw it. And think about this: What would 45k back then be worth today?”

National publications beloved by readers like SuperPrep Magazine and Tom Lemming’s Prep Football Report could now be supplemented with daily updates. Forget about waiting for the next issue of SuperPrep, which published three times per year. The magazine’s publisher, Allen Wallace, was now accessible via his hotline. For team-specific information on Pitt, Penn State and West Virginia, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette high school sports reporter Mike White was available via 1-900-776-HIKE.

King knew his listeners wanted to know all there was about Peyton Manning’s recruitment to Tennessee — a hot topic in 1994. Stirt was devoted to Florida, while Lemming and Wallace had lines dedicated to the top prospects and the top teams nationally. Coaches were interested too, knowing that these hotlines had information about the prospects they wanted to sign.

Trying to piece together who else was on campus for a visit was valuable information to put on one’s hotline. Intel about who was leaning toward committing to what school was bound to bring in money.

“It was like kids in a candy store,” Wallace said.

Wallace had two phone lines that each had eight channels. His desk was littered with a legal pad and charts to help him remember who would get talked about on which of his 16 channels. Wallace was no stranger to hard work. The USC alum quit his job as an attorney to dive into the once-foreign concept of writing about the top high school football prospects. Readers were always calling and asking when his next magazine would ship. He believed the 900 number could supplement the print product.

“The 900 business was exciting but also hugely time consuming,” Wallace said. “I felt a lot of pressure. … I just wanted to make it so that when people hung up the phone, they said, ‘You know, I’m glad I made the call. I know something now. He charged me money, but I can tell that he had a conversation with the guy.’”

The cost of obtaining recruiting information was steep for some. Spouses worried as their partners huddled around the phone listening to a mysterious voice on the other end.

“After these (recruiting-heavy) months are over, I’d get a call once a day, sometimes 10 times a day,” King said. “They’d say, ‘Bill, man, we just got our phone bill and the wife is furious. You were doing what? What were you listening to? About some ballplayer? $400?’”

There was something about seeing a bill full of 900 numbers that didn’t sit well with many.

“It was crazy. I had a person who called so many times that his wife called me begging me to not let him call anymore,” Stirt said. “She said he had about $150 worth of 900 calls. She put a block on their phone number just like you would for a kid with porn lines.”

Wallace wasn’t surprised by this development. His SuperFax service — which sent recruiting updates to subscribers’ fax machines — had already landed some folks in the doghouse.

“I’d hear interesting anecdotes from subscribers who would say that I caused problems in their marriage because they’d hear these fax machines going off making loud noises in the middle of the night,” Wallace said. “Their wives would be going, ‘What is this? Who is faxing us in the middle of the night?’ Then, they’d be arguing about it.”

Sure, casual fans could indulge in the hotline, but Lemming thought of this as a way to cater to the most hardcore of college football fans. He thought of them as the one-percenters. These were the folks who cared so much about who could potentially be on their favorite team that he seemingly couldn’t feed them enough information.

He’d travel the country meeting with recruits face to face and then would post up on a pay phone in whatever airport he was passing through to update his 900 number. The unpredictability that comes with relying on teenagers as the primary source of information sometimes left callers outraged.

“You could say a kid was going to announce Tuesday at 7 p.m. and then you’d call him and you couldn’t reach him,” Lemming said. “Or, he’d say, ‘Well, I decided not to.’ You got that a few times and then the people would get mad at you. It wasn’t an exact science, these 900 lines, but it was fun while it lasted.”

The paychecks were hit or miss depending on the time of the year. It was quieter in the summer, but the ramp-up to the February signing date always meant December, January and February were critical.

King had his old laptop and would log on to the Internet, believing that sooner rather than later the clunky connection speeds would morph into whatever was coming next. The wave of recruiting websites and message boards would take down the 900 numbers, creating a new frontier in recruiting coverage.

“I saw what was coming,” said Stirt, who sold his publication in 1998. “We were still doing a pretty good hotline business then, but it started to deteriorate somewhat. By the time I sold, within two years the revenues I had taken in in 1996 were reduced by about 90 percent because of the internet.”

Stirt still has the printouts from the phone company detailing the first month of his hotline. He could see who was calling by area code and how long they stayed on the line. He laughs about it now, much like King does when he meets the occasional radio show listener who tells him that he’s been a fan of his so long that he used to pay $1.79 per minute to listen to him talk about recruiting.

 

 

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