Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but college football recruiting is not for the faint of heart.
I mentioned it yesterday, but this is a 365-day-a-year racket, and if coaches don’t stay on top of things in the talent acquisition world, they’ll be run out of town so fast it will make your head spin.
Recruiting is the lifeblood of every great program, but unfortunately, a lot of the inner workings of acquiring high school talent is getting on a plane every weekend and telling a bunch of 16- and 17-year-olds how great they are, only to see them choose another school in the 11th hour because they offered their grandma a house or something.
It’s a thankless job, and oftentimes the antics of some of these high school athletes will be enough to make you want to stop watching college football altogether.
Take Li’Marcus Jones, for example (great name, by the way).
Jones is an offensive tackle from the Nashville area and one of the top recruits in the state of Tennessee.
For a while, he was verbally committed to the University of Colorado.
With how the season is going for coach Prime and the Buffs, though, it was only a matter of time before some of their committed prospects started to look elsewhere, and Jones apparently decided to finally pull the plug and stay a little closer to home, opting to flip to Mississippi State on Monday afternoon.
Seems like a solid choice, given the Bulldogs’ success early in the season when quarterback Kamario Taylor and running back Fluff Bothwell were still healthy.
It is a program on the rise, especially on offense, and I’m sure any lineman would be more than happy to block for those two guys.
But just as it seemed Li’Marcus found his home for the next four years (or at least until the transfer portal opened next winter), it happened.
30 hours.
That’s all it took for Jones to get cold feet and flip back to Colorado.
You would think someone would tell this kid, “Hey, take a day or two to think this over before doing something rash.”
Or, at the very least, hand him a dictionary so he can look up the word “commitment.”
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I’m not trying to pick on Li’Marcus here, because plenty of recruits do stuff like this.
Hell, he’s not even the first one to do it this recruiting cycle.
Oddly enough, this happened back in June, also involving Colorado and a school from the Magnolia State (Ole Miss).
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You know what they say, if I had a nickel for every time a 2027 high school football recruit pulled the old “flip snip-snap” between Colorado and an SEC school from Mississippi, I’d have two nickels.
Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird it happened twice.