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Sunday, July 14, 2002
BY STEVE POLITI
Star-Ledger Staff
One is a technophobe who attends hundreds of games each year despite never learning how to drive. One is a former insurance salesman whose first exposure to basketball came waiting tables at a country club. One has never applied for a job in his adult life and, even after 20 years in his field, sometimes still struggles to pay his bills.
Tom Konchalski. Bob Gibbons. Clark Francis.
They are among the top basketball recruiting
analysts, and if the best high school players are chasing a bouncing orange ball somewhere in this country, they likely are scattered in the bleachers with their notepads, scribbling observations they later sell to an insatiable audience of college coaches and hoops junkies.
Plus, with recent rule changes, they are becoming more powerful. As the NCAA continues to limit the access to high school tournaments and camps, college coaches are forced to rely more heavily on information and observations from the self-appointed basketball gurus.
"They have become more important, no question," Mike Brey, the head coach at Notre Dame, said during the Adidas ABCD Camp in Hackensack last week. "The problem is, it seems like there's four or five new ones every month. Each state now has its own recruiting Web site. Pretty soon, it'll be every county."
Gibbons, the man often credited for starting the recruiting craze, is shocked to see the industry his former hobby has become, with hundreds of Internet sites that provide competing player evaluations and information about where the blue-chip prospects will attend college.
"It is almost out of control," he said, "but I can't do anything about that."
Gibbons developed his passion for basketball after working as a waiter where the North Carolina basketball team ate dinner. He put an ad in Basketball Weekly in 1977 offering up a list of the 300 best players in the country and where they would attend college. The price: $5. He had 800 requests.
It was a dining-room operation, with Gibbons photocopying his list and mailing it out from his Lenoir, N.C., home, but it slowly blossomed into something bigger. He was able to quit his insurance job and concentrate full-time on his All-Star Report, which was published in several newspapers nationwide.
Others soon followed. Konchalski started banging out his own report, focused on the East Coast, on a typewriter in his Forest Hills, N.Y., home and was successful enough to leave his job as a high school teacher. Francis created The Hoop Scoop in the mid-'80s, just after graduating from Indiana.
They were among the first, but the Internet has enabled anyone with a passion and a printer to start his own scouting service. There are regional sites, such as NJHoops.com, and school specific sites, such as Rutgersfan.com. Many of the sites do their own reporting and their own evaluations of players.
And there are hundreds of them.
"Unfortunately, no credentials are required," said Brick Oettinger, who first started writing his recruiting column 25 years ago. "Anybody can do it. So who do you believe?"
Brey said Notre Dame subscribes to five or six of the "old guard services," the same number given by Rutgers coach Gary Waters and Kansas coach Roy Williams. All three said they ignore the painstaking evaluations and ratings the gurus compile at tournaments and camps.
"The biggest thing I think they're useful for is getting new names, new addresses, new coaches names," Williams said. "There are some guys who over the years have proven that they're pretty doggone good at what they do, but I'm still not going to go on their evaluations. That's where you're going to make mistakes."
Often, the ratings are off base. Sometimes, they are just flat out wrong.
Tim Duncan did not crack a single recruiting list entering college, and yet he finished his career at Wake Forest as one of the best college players ever. Felipe Lopez made the top of every list, and his career at St. John's hardly lived up to the hype.
Chris Burgess is one recent example of recruiting evaluations gone bad. Almost every analyst had him rated among the top five players in 1997, and when he picked Duke over BYU, the Blue Devils were credited with one of the best recruiting classes ever.
Gibbons had Burgess ranked second in the nation and said he was "arguably as good as Chris Webber" and "better than (Christian) Laettner coming out of high school." Francis even called him "the next Bill Walton" after ranking him No. 3 in the class.
Webber, Laettner, Walton and Burgess. Five years later, it is not difficult to pick out which name does not fit on that list. Burgess transferred from Duke to Utah and never made an impact in either program.
"Did we miss on him? No. He just didn't get better," Francis said. "Things like that happen. These guys were great high school players. For whatever reason, they didn't pan out. Yeah, we miss on a few, but not that many."
Francis, like the rest of his colleagues, acknowledges the inexact science involved in the process. But he also admits that politics play a major role in the popular lists on his Web site.
Most analysts compile a list of the top 100 or more players in their class. If Rutgers gets a player in the top 10 while Seton Hall fails to land one in the top 50, the perception about the recruiting efforts at both schools will change accordingly.
But how does a player get on those lists? Sometimes, Francis said, he will rank a certain player higher to develop a better relationship with a coach or a program. Anywhere from 10 to 15 players on his list are determined that way. Even Gibbons, whose list is published across the country, calls it "just for show." If powerhouse Duke is recruiting a player, it is likely to sway him to rank that player higher.
"I might have 125 players rated at the same level," Gibbons said. "So how do you fit in the bottom part of the top 100? Well, you have to be subjective. I might say, 'Okay, this list is going in The Star-Ledger, I'll list a couple of New Jersey kids."
Added Francis, "People take the rankings way too seriously."
Even as Francis sat in the press box at Fairleigh Dickinson University's Rothman Center, Darius Washington and his father, Darius Sr., scoured a printout of his latest list in the bleachers below.
Washington, a point guard from Orlando, insisted he "doesn't pay any attention" to the rankings. But his father was livid at the recent list, which had his son listed as the fourth-best point guard in the camp, behind No. 1 Sebastian Telfair, whom Washington outplayed the day before in a camp game.
"He works too hard for this," the father said, the list crumbled tightly in his first. "This is ridiculous."
Players also find inaccurate information about where they plan to attend college.
Eddie Griffin, the Philadelphia star who attended Seton Hall for a season, saw a report that had him "signed, sealed and delivered" to UCLA when he never intended to go that far from home. Bob Oliva has encountered so many false rumors about his players at Christ the King in Middle Village, N.Y., that he doesn't believe anything he reads on the Internet.
"What I want to know is," Oliva said, "who are these guys?"
Copyright 2002 The Star-Ledger
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