Thirty-two years ago, Georgia's landmark signing of Herschel Walker came well before the Internet, well before cellphones and well before college football recruiting evolved into a spectator sport of its own.
Imagine if today's technology and fanfare had accompanied the 1980 recruitment of the running back from Wrightsville.
"I couldn't even presume to imagine what it would have been like," said Mike Cavan, who as a Georgia assistant coach led the Bulldogs' recruitment of Walker. "It was pretty hectic as it was."
Back then, Cavan said, the relatively few people who followed recruiting did so mostly via "word of mouth."
"One of my buddies from Atlanta would call me and say, ‘How's it going?'" Cavan recalled. "I'd say, ‘It looks good,' or I'd talk about something that happened [on the recruiting trail] that I liked or didn't like. And the next thing I knew, 100 people would have heard it.
"Now, thousands would know it instantaneously."
Make that tens -- or hundreds -- of thousands.
Walker's instant impact on the Georgia program, which won the national championship in his freshman season, sparked a surge of interest in recruiting, particularly in the South. And that surge soon was turbocharged by technology.
"I consider myself a recruiting vet, but from what my Georgia old-timers have told me ... Wrightsville, Georgia, was the birthplace of recruiting [interest]," ESPN recruiting analyst Jamie Newberg said.
By the mid-1980s, recruiting newsletters and magazines had replaced word of mouth. By the early 1990s, 900 number hotlines charged by the minute for updated information. And then the Internet transformed recruiting from a cottage industry into a big business.
"Recruiting + Internet = the perfect marriage," Newberg wrote in an email. "I think that has been the catalyst for this dynamic growth and attention we have seen, especially over the last decade. It's certainly more mainstream."
Now some prospects announce their college choices live on national TV and players of yesteryear marvel at the frenzy.
"It was so low-keyed back then," said Randy Rhino, reflecting on his recruitment to Georgia Tech in 1971. "I'm not even sure if it was ever announced in the paper. I guess there probably was a list [published]."
Rhino, a defensive back and punt returner who became a three-time All-American for the Yellow Jackets, was living in Charlotte and on the verge of signing with North Carolina when Tech, where his father played football and baseball, offered a scholarship.
The process was different in many ways then, Rhino recalled: Alumni could be involved in recruiting; there were no limits on how many scholarships a school could give; and recruits did not know what other players a team was recruiting at his position.
Rhino laments another change: the tendency of many prospects these days to base their decisions on choosing a "platform" to get to the NFL, rather than focusing on education.
"That's a shame," he said.
Lucius Sanford was a highly recruited linebacker at West Fulton High who signed with Georgia Tech in 1974 after making visits to Michigan, Nebraska ("wind chill 33 below zero," he remembers), Duke and Pittsburgh. For all the changes, he thinks the factors that drive recruits' decisions should be constant.
"I remember my high school coach, Walter Wade, sitting down with me and basically we always looked at things from three points of view: education first, then sport, then social life," said Sanford, who earned All-American honors at Tech. "From those points of view, I think it should still be the same. But when it gets to technology and testing and what you know about kids, it's probably a lot more advanced than it was."
In 1980, when NCAA rules did not prohibit coaches from "bumping" into recruits on a daily basis as long as the encounters were unscheduled, Cavan lived for several months in a Wrightsville cabin.
"It wasn't the same as now, but it was still crazy," Cavan said of Walker's recruitment.
Even without the Internet, rumors spread -– like the one about John Robinson, then the USC coach, flying from Los Angeles to Atlanta and checking into a Macon hotel with intentions of signing Walker. Turned out, there was a John Robinson registered at the hotel.
But he was a traveling salesman from Valdosta.
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