College Watch: Big 12, Pac 10, SEC
South County's Andre Simmons will become just the second area player to be on scholarship in the SEC. He'll be joining an extremely young Vanderbilt secondary that looks to replicate last season's success which ranked ninth in the nation in pass defense.
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By: Derek LeComte
At the start of the "College Watch" series, I said I was stunned. Stunned mainly because of just how successful the talent around here has been at the college level.
So many two stars have broken into the two-deep rotation and just about every three star and four star players have assumed starting roles--and not on special teams.
But grasp for a second the fact that Northern Virginia is represented in all six BCS conferences. Quite frankly, it's stunning (there's that word again). To give a little detail and context so you don't get lost, these three conferences--the Big 12, SEC, and Pac 10--thrive off of their local prospects. In fact, that's pretty much how all of college football works. Schools establish connections in their area and then recruit those players.
Virginia Tech, for example, has worked tirelessly to establish a fairly decent connection to the Tidewater area. However, you won't see them trying to recruit a kid out of, say, the state of Arkansas. It would just be a waste of time. The University of Arkansas, Texas and a good amount of SEC schools would have already established connections to that area and have probably been talking to that recruit, his parents and coach since he was a sophomore (don't tell me about recruiting violations, this is the SEC we're talking about after all).
So only a few schools can recruit nationally, and they can because of their name brand. Notre Dame and USC are good examples of this because as they don't need no stinkin' connections. All they have to do is show up and say, "Hi, we're from USC. We [used to] play for national titles, win Rose Bowls, have a tremendous history and by the way, we have some of the hottest girls on the planet. Come play football for us?" Done deal. But because only a select amount of schools get to recruit off of their name brand, that means only a few players get recruited nationwide.
So for the Big 12, each school has established pipelines down to Texas and they do a pretty good job of sucking that state dry of its talent. This is especially true for the Texas schools as finding a non-Texan on their rosters would be like finding Billy Graham hanging out at the Playboy Mansion.
Every Pac 10 school taps into California and the SEC, well, pretty much every state down there is full of talent, especially down in Florida.
Basically, they don't need us. They can win conference and national titles just using what's around them. Unless the prospect has a 757 area code or is a four-star recruit, those coaches could care less. Yet despite all of that, a few of these schools made some long-distance calls to the prospects and coaches in this area and seriously recruited them.
As it stands now, there are five area players in these three conferences and it's simply amazing that only one of them, Damien Thigpen, could be classified as one of those "national recruits." What's even better is that they're all impact players for their team, except of course for Simmons who is just stepping on campus.
Just to get the attention of these coaches is an accomplishment, but it's all the more sweeter when they earn playing time and in one case, turn into a major contributor.
