The First Wednesday of February is Christmas part two for football coaching staffs across the country, because it is the first day that recruits can sign their National Letter of Intent.
This day is called National Signing Day and universities across the countries are welcoming new student-athletes, and Bowling Green State University is no different.
On this day 17 players signed up to be a Falcon for the year 2014. Twelve members of the class signed to help bolster an already talented defense and six signed to an already explosive offense.
Head Football Coach Dino Babers in his press conference made sure to give credit to the people who had the biggest influence in recruiting these players. Dave Clawson recruited most of the class as, Athletic Director Chris Kingston also had a big hand in keeping in contact with them all as they were going through the coaching change.
“Chris Kingston came to me in the interview process and made sure that we honored every commit that coach Clawson handed to him and we did that 100 percent,” Babers said. “They are all part of our family now and we can’t wait to get started with them.”
The recruits created their own bond together as they were waiting for the new football coach to be announced. Other schools after the departure of Clawson may have started looking to steer them to their school but, they stayed together and bonded with each other by the use social media.
“They were interested in being Falcons,” Babers said. “They were more concerned with being Bowling Green State University graduates and staying and keeping this class together.”
When you look at the list of signees there are a few things that stand out. One thing is that 13 of the 18 total recruits are from the state of Ohio.
“This is our country, our land and this is the state we want to recruit,” Babers said. “We need to live on the state of Ohio and we are absolutely committed to doing that.”
There are also four recruits who are classified as mid-year enrollees, which allows those athletes to start class in the spring and begin practicing earlier than the other recruits in the class.
“This is a huge advantage for them,” Babers said. “It gives them a strong opportunity to step in and be a leader and contributor to this football team.”
The one thing that the football program will do is force themselves to play the young people during two-a-days because of how simple their system is. All of the positions are open to the young recruits accoriding to Babers.
“If they are physically gifted enough to help us then we will incorporate them into the fold,” Babers said. “A lot of programs will keep those players buried in the depth chart so they don’t have an opportunity to play and they can automatically redshirt them, that is not the case in this program.”
The next thing for this class if not the biggest part of the class was the signing of seven defensive backs. The graduating class forced the program to focus on defensive back for the future, this may be the biggest win for the staff as they signed seven players to fill a need.
“Defensive back was a big thing for us we really had to concentrate on the secondary this year with the graduation’s we had on defense.” Babers said.
This program has focused on characeter, leadership and academics very much in the past years and this class is no different. Most of these recruits were captains or co-captains of their high school football programs.
“Captains are a big deal, having the ability to lead others is rare today,” Babers said. “It is also important to find young men from winning programs because winners find ways to do things and don’t find excuses on what went wrong.”
This is the first recruiting class in the Babers era for the Falcons, now comes spring practice and two-a-days as they prepare for the 2014 season.
“The key thing is to make sure we are getting high quality people, people who understand that academics are important along with great character, a winning tradition and someone that can play and help us win.” Babers said.
