Time for our Friday recruiting Update and a few choice tidbits from around Oregon and SW Washington. This week we saw some new offers, some moves to already recruit parents and kids to off-season football, and an extraordinaire Tweet by a local reporter.
The Good
They are as follows:
- Round 2 of the Oregon and Washington Playoffs is in Full Swing.
- Recruiting News-
- Jarred Daul – Jesuit 2 Way linemen lands a Preferred walk on offer in hand now from the Ducks- This was big for him.
- Austin Kramer – The superb WR Talent from Crater nabbed himself a UO PWO offer to join Daul! Good option for him.
- Michael Matthews – Camas LB- After receiving several offers this nasty tough big mover who plays LB and RB for Mighty Camas has pulled the trigger and is planning to attend Montana. He committed yesterday on his Twitter feed. He joins Skyler Martin of Skyview and Hillsboro’s RJ Nelson in the commitment. Matthews is superb and the Grizzlies are taking out one of the best trios from this Region.
- Talanoa Hufanga – we talked about him last week as a guy we feel moves to #1 in the State if not the Region and being a possible 5 Star. This week he added Illinois and then USC. His rise East continues!
- Jack Colletto – Camas HS QB – He led the #1 team in the State All year as a QB, trained himself to be one of the best, and is now one of the very few QB’s in this Class of 2017 with an offer. Idaho State has made an offer to Jack and will be taking a close look at that one.
- Kyle Rygg – Sheldon High’s All League DT and DE landed one of those Oregon PWO golden tickets.
- Braden Lenzy – Tigard- The 2018 speed burner and top recruit has landed an offer from the fighting Illini. Illinois is Coached by Lovie Smith and this Big 10 power is showing some real range coming out here after Lenzy!
- Carson Crawford – Beaverton – Landed a nice offer from West Point; could be a perfect fit for the NWPR POY in 6A.
The Bad
The Big Game in the Pacific NW tonight is in Camas (WA) Tonight. #1 Camas VS #5 Graham Kapowsin in the opening of the playoffs! What a really terribly system this WIAA system has. While this game will be unreal in terms of talent (#2 in the Nation Linemen Foster Sarrell for 1) it will also leave one of the best teams in the NW out of the playoffs in the early rounds. The Oregon system would never allow this sort of match up as our Power Rankings and other algorithms carefully place our best teams into the 4 brackets insuring no top team exits early unless they are beat by a lower seed.
7 On 7- Private Football Leagues are Starting!
The season is not over yet and already we have teams organizing for the off-season 7 on 7 football circuit. This is what it has come to. These “elite” programs expect kids and their parents to show up on the weekends and during the work week to workouts, tryout, and more. This gets very expensive very fast. It is also often a mistaken path to college recruiting. Proof is in the pudding. Some of these groups are excellent. Just as many are terrible.
There are a Myriad of issues that Parents and athletes should consider – overuse injuries, 1 sport specialization, injuries during competitions, undue influence to move schools, and more. The Facts are these events are not related to college recruiting. A 7 on 7 star will not necessarily translate to college success. Parents need to proceed with CAUTION and check with your High School coaches first. It is really sad that there seems to be a Race on to get these going to affiliate the best kids with specific programs.
Rest assured that transfers of student athletes in the off-season can be traced to these events in many cases and these events nationwide are leading to the privatization of High School football as a club sport. I can not understand why more AD’s and Head Coaches are not more vocal about this. Just my opinion. We have to balance the good with the bad here.
Who is starting up? 3 groups seem ready to launch their tryouts and teams which include weekly training and travelling to tournaments.
Ford Sports Performance– By Far the #1 group in the Pacific NW is Ford Sports Performance. The success of Tracy Ford and his group out of Bellevue is without rival. Of all the Teams that compete in the Private 7 on 7 Sector his groups and Taylor Barton’s (Barton Football) have done the best job and have the highest degree of professionalism. NWPR will not cover any 7 on 7 team nor event if specific Safety and ethical codes are not met. We are working on an agreement with this group to cover these issues. They have tryouts in Hillsboro starting 11-20-16.
E FORCE- Alex Brink’s group is E-Force. They have sure drawn in a lot of the best of the NW. They seem to do a good job. The biggest concern I have here is that several players have indicated that they were told they had to be with this group or they would not receive coverage by certain reporters. The use of the hashtag #EFORCEMOB is also a grave concern. Because 7 on 7 teams Nationwide have a Gang or Mob-like mentality and there are many teams sponsored financially these words in my view have no place in football or amateur sports. Eforce has announced try outs beginning 12-17-16 and to their credit they are waiting until after Oregon has the State Championships.
TEAM Lillard – Houston Lillard – This is a new player in this space. Damian Lillard’s brother Houston is starting his own 7 on 7 team. We have a call in to him to see what this is all about. Houston could be doing something very interesting here especially for the kids in Portland. More to follow.
The Ugly-
I will be brief on this.
Oregon’s premier recruit at the RB / Athlete space for next season is Trey Lowe of Jesuit. This week he apparently/reportedly messaged Oregon Live’s reporter and Recruiting Analyst Andrew Nemec. In the private message to Nemec Lowe reportedly took issues with the fact he was rated lower then other recruits in the Region by Nemec. He indicated he did not care what Nemec thought but told Nemec he would not do interviews with him as a result. Lowe spoke his mind and for a Kid he seemed to do so in a fairly straight -forward manner.
Nemec in retaliation appears to have done something that crossed the line. He took the Private message from Lowe and tweeted it out calling Lowe out saying “How not to handle your recruitment and/or the media as a HS athlete…”.
This is Ugly. An adult outing a kid and shaming them on Twitter. It is unclear why he (Nemec) did this other then he was upset. What is clear is that he took a Private message and as a representative of Oregon’s biggest News Media outlet he abused his power.
A fire storm ensued on Twitter. Many athletes close to Lowe went after Nemec including Lowe’s All American brother and former Duck Keanon Lowe. Safe to say Nemec burned a lot of bridges. It is not clear that he broke any laws in posting this message. What is clear is that it was very wrong.
Why would any recruit ever want to communicate or do an interview with a reporter who would do this? What is any power does someone like Nemec have over recruiting? None really.
The Tweet was removed by Nemec but nor before various athletes took a screen shot of it and reposted it.
Parents and kids control your message, watch who you speak too, and understand that More is not better when it comes to communication.
Andrew is not a bad guy- he desperately seems to want to be highly regarded as a top recruiting analyst. This was not a great move and may cost him his job at some point. Oregonian or not this is not how one earns the trust of the athletes or their coaches and families. He needs to make a public apology and move on. That has not happened. This also is an issue that the OSAA needs to address. I have personally asked them to develop a code of ethics for reporters gaining a badge to the sidelines and it would cover things like this, ranking children by putting numbers on them, and address things like communicating with minors without coaches or parents involvement. Enough said here. Very unfortunate indeed.
