Save Your Boos For Halloween

Been to see your favorite team lately? If so, and if they happened to be having a bad day, was their performance greeted with a chorus of boos from the home crowd?

In this era of expensive tickets and unlimited fan expression, it is nothing to hear a thunderous negative response from the crowd at a home stadium. And when that crowd is questioned about their actions by the host on the local sports talk station, you will hear an endless parade of callers defending their right to let the coaches and athletic director know that they don't like what they are getting for their money.

The fans are certainly within their rights to let the coaches have it on game day. Indeed, that instant gratification probably provides some minor amount of relief to a guy in the stands suffering through a lousy performance.

But cooler-headed fans often try to be the voice of reason, asking the boo birds to think about the possible consequences of their actions. In reading about some recent recruiting news in the SEC, I think these folks now have a stronger argument.

Josh Nunes, a high school quarterback from Upland, California who is rated as the number twelve prospect in the country at his position by Rivals.com, had committed to play football for the University of Tennessee in the fall of 2009. He is a big kid with a strong arm, good high school stats and a four star rating, and he was headed for Knoxville.

But after his commitment, Nunes attended the UT game against Florida a few weeks ago in Big Orange country. As you know if you watched, Tennessee looked especially flat in losing 30-6 to the Gators and the crowd let them have it. According to sportswriter Ron Higgins of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the Nunes family expressed concerns to UT officials about this booing, as well as the crowd response at other UT home games.

Now, a couple of weeks later, Nunes has changed his commitment and will attend Stanford next fall. BOOOO!!!!!!

Anyone who has seen UT play this fall knows that their offense looks awful. In conference games against Auburn and Florida, they have scored a total of 18 points. Junior quarterback Jonathan Crompton has looked as though he is in over his head, and the prospects for improved offensive outputs against other top defensive teams in conference are not good.

Under these circumstances, the idea of losing a highly rated quarterback prospect should be a painful thing for UT fans. An elite QB who comes in and starts for three years can be a program changing talent. How different would things have been in Knoxville if fans had discouraged a visiting Peyton Manning with their reactions, and instead of going to UT he had followed in his dad's footsteps and enrolled at Ole Miss? And as you ponder that question, think about how the folks in Oxford, Mississippi would answer.

However, if you read some of the Tennessee fan message boards, they consider Nunes a wuss and question whether he would have been a good long term fit for their program if he didn't like hearing a little bit of booing from the crowd. And certainly a tough guy like Peyton wouldn't have been influenced by crowd response, would he?

It's important to remember that the people we are talking about in the recruiting process are 17 or 18 year old high school seniors. Judging the sort of things that might influence their decisions through adult eyes is the sort of reactionary mistake made by people who also shower boos down upon teams of 18 to 22 year old college students when they play poorly. And though you are certainly entitled to do both, you might ask yourself if you should.

Let me put it another way. A kid on a recruiting visit at any university is treated like a future hero. He is told he will be the big man on campus at a school that worships football. He is shown the finest facilities, fed the best food and pampered in any way that fits within NCAA rules. But what happens when the biggest event of his weekend visit, the football game, is memorable mostly for the deafening boos from the crowd after a fumble or an interception? Any recruit that your program truly wants will have plenty of options, and some of the schools he visits may have fans who are a bit more polite.

One last note...Nunes went to football camps at Stanford and told the daily paper in Knoxville that contributing factors in his decision were "distance and difficulty of getting there (Knoxville) from my home". He also said that he had mistakenly thought he would not have a chance to play at Stanford.

While this might sound like UT's fans are off the hook for souring the kid on their school, I suspect he was just trying to fib in order to be nice.

In addition to interest from UT, Nunes was being recruited by Florida and Oklahoma. These are two of the best programs in the country, while Stanford has been at the bottom of their conference for a few years now. So the chances that such an elite QB who attended the Stanford football camp did not get a scholarship offer from that school until very late in the process, after he had already committed elsewhere, are extremely slim. And it was not a matter of wondering whether he could get into Stanford, because one of the other schools considered by Nunes was Harvard.

The best guess here is that Nunes committed to UT, but changed his mind after the Florida game. He didn't want to go halfway across the country to get booed, so he went the safe route and stayed close to home at Stanford.