Oregon Loves to Show Off

I remember hearing about some of this stuff a few years ago, how Oregon had someone to do “comics” of their recruiting targets, looking for every advantage possible. Well, SI.com has gotten ahold of the Jonathan Stewart recruiting tool. Here’s a snippet:

Back in 2005, Oregon coaches enlisted students to design custom comic books for the Ducks’ top 20 recruiting targets. Each comic portrayed the recruit as a hero who leads the Ducks to a national title. Oregon sent each prospect one page per week during the recruiting period. Here is the entire comic made for running back Jonathan Stewart, one of the nation’s top recruits at the time.

It’s uh, well, kind of strange. Give it a look here.

Here, they tout their locker room. High-speed internet, personal cooling system, satellite TV’s, DVD, x-box, the whole works.

Here you see, of course, Stewart scores the winning TD. I love the Phil Knight “yay!” from his luxury box. Look at what my money can buy! And you can see his handlers are telling him to cheer.
I just can’t understand how it is these young men come to college with a, shall we say, an inflated sense of self? Imagine being in high school and having someone not only recruiting you as hard as they can, but actually handing you a full-blown comic about what a freakin’ GOD you will be at their school? Amazing. Now you can see what we were up against, and this is just one small thing from Oregon. It’s still interesting to think that we were in the final two for Stewart. How could we compete with glitz like this? Then again, we’ve said it before, but if kids are only going somewhere for the uniforms or plasma’s in the locker room, then they aren’t a fit at WSU. Still, would be nice to get a sugar-daddy. What could have been, Paul Allen.