Your Take Too Much, Too Soon

I talked to Rich Rodriguez and Brian Kelly this off-season at two different times in two different settings. They were the ones who brought up the subject independently.
Entitlement. The attitude that makes certain people act like they are owed something.
“I sense a bit of entitlement that needs to be rectified,” Kelly said, shortly after taking the Notre Dame job. “I think the challenges are within.”
“We cannot have a sense of entitlement,” Rodriguez said. “We have to earn it. We have to earn the Michigan degree, we have to earn championships and BCS bowls. As coaches we kind of know that, but it was a hard lesson for some players. We’ll win more when we deserve to win more.”
If it’s happening at Michigan (8-16 in Rich Rod’s two seasons) and Notre Dame (22 years and counting without a championship) then we have to expect that swagger has elbowed dedication out of the way pretty much everywhere. We were all young and dumb once. We did stupid stuff. Some of us were lucky and didn’t cross the line -- get arrested, get kicked off the team, lose it all. But there are too many today who do.
That’s why I have a problem, a big one, with these nationally televised high school games. You want entitlement? You’re cultivating it if you support this dark niche of TV programming. It’s like giving toddlers a sucker after they spill milk. They haven’t earned it.
By and large, neither have these kids. Look, I understand that at some point these games became ratings winners. I also have to ask where do we stop? Next thing you know we’ll be televising little girls’ fashion shows. Oh wait, it’s already been done. As good a movie as Little Miss Sunshine was, the underlying message poked through. What kind of people exploit children like this?
There’s a huge difference between watching, playing and loving high school football and profiting from it. It’s a different kind of exploitation – and hypocrisy – in high school football. I have a hard time with networks – ESPN isn’t the only one – that televise these games then do investigative pieces on Florida having 30 arrests in five years. Don’t you get it? At least in some small way one begets the other.
You keep giving the kid that sucker and he figures out he doesn’t have to work for it. Don’t you have to DO something at 17 years of age to merit this kind of attention? It used to be that the star of the high school football team dated the head cheerleader. Now he’s taken to Orlando or San Antonio for an all-star game.
You want entitlement? Check out the Army all-star game which has become more of a schmoozefest than a contest. In every commercial break we see some star or another picking a hat out of a bag. They call it a commitment. I call it an insult to our intelligence.
Half these kids don’t know how to open a door for a lady. The other half haven’t been kissed by one yet. But let’s all kneel at the altar of Johnny Football because he picked Notre Dame.
You know what the stats say don’t you? If they don’t fail outright, they fail to live up to expectations as players. The expectations of the ratings systems, of the coaches, of the fans. That’s the ultimate fallacy of this stuff. We’ve developed a belief system based on hype.
Top 100 list? Please. They can’t all be stars. Only a fraction are.
I’ll go back to a story I did before February’s signing day. I decided to take a look back at the No. 1 signing class in 2005. Tom Lemming said that year it was Nebraska. Five years later Lemming couldn’t remember who was in it. Same for the guy who was largely responsible for signing it, assistant John Blake.
“Who was in that class,” he asked me.
Let’s break it down: Twelve jucos were in the class. Three never made it past a year. One guy stuck around for five years and made one career tackle. Those players never won a championship but came within one second of upsetting Texas in December. There were a handful of future NFLers including Ndamukong Suh. The best class in the country five years ago averaged an 8-5 season.
“A year from now, everyone will be talking about this Nebraska class as their greatest in the last 25 years,” Lemming said in 2005. Asked about it this year, he said: “I could go home and look it up, I can’t remember last year’s [No. 1 class].”
That’s the point. This year’s heroes are next year’s afterthoughts. Not all of them, of course, but the point is there are more underachievers than stars in this racket. Let’s not forget that.
I’m not blaming the kids, I just want to put them in their place. If that sounds pre-historic then so be it. Let’s keep a dose of reality around the house. We didn’t know how we were going to turn out as teenagers. In many ways life is a mystery at that age. It shouldn’t be served with steak and lobster.
They can’t possibly know at age 17 what kind of curves life is going to throw at them. They buy in, because we buy in. A few years ago a can’t-miss linebacker named Willie Williams bragged about ordering the steak and lobster during a recruiting visit to Florida State. He also allegedly went gonzo with a fire extinguisher while at Florida. Apparently, there was no one to tell him no. His actions almost single-handedly led to sweeping NCAA recruiting reforms.
Because of Willie’s bad actions, the NCAA did a good thing.
But even the association can’t control teenage television. I’ve tried in recent years to stay away from referring a kid by his recruiting ranking, but I’m guilty, too. The genie is out of the bottle or rather, the five-star tailback has broken the line of scrimmage.
Can he be caught?

Dennis Dodd is a senior writer for
CBSSports.com.