In the midst of the holiday crush last week, a beleaguered mail carrier knocked on the door of a Long Beach home. As if the added burden of Christmas cards and wrapped presents weren’t enough, this particular address required a special delivery: an entire mailbag full of envelopes made out to John Smith. That’s the once-in-a-generation player better known to family, fans, recruiters, and yes, even mail carriers, as JuJu.
Inside the bag were 477 pieces of mail from the Notre Dame football program, part of their so-called “Pot of Gold” recruiting blitz. Each one of the letters to Smith was meant to represent one of the 477 Golden Domers who’ve been drafted into the NFL. It’s just the latest in a long line of increasingly outlandish tricks utilized by major college football teams who are trying to entice top-level talent to their programs.

Smith, who is currently in Florida preparing for the Under Armour All-American Game on Jan. 2, is rated a five-star athlete by Scout.com, 247sports, and Yahoo, and is a consensus top 20 recruit in the nation. As such, he’s planted in the middle of the growing industry of major collegiate recruiting, a world where college coaches, the media — and custom mail printers, apparently — are making a good living trying to influence or discover the choices of a few talented players.
Now that he’s seen what the process is like for the last year, Smith was asked to describe it. With a laugh, he said, “Very aggressive.”

It didn’t used to be that way. In the late 1950s, when Al Davis wanted to recruit a Long Beach Poly football player of Smith’s caliber to USC, he’d simply pick up the phone and call the Jackrabbits’ football coach, Dave Levy, and tell him he wanted the player. Or he’d make the short drive to see him at a game or practice and talk to him in person. Very few recruits chose colleges out of state, and the investment in recruiting by even the biggest programs was minimal.
Now, in 2013, Sports Illustrated calls the rapidly growing ranks of recruiters the new “arms race” of college football. According to the Tuscaloosa News, the 2012 Alabama football team employed 24 noncoaching recruiters and analysts. As SI points out, the NCAA only allows for 14 total coaches to actually instruct players on the field — but colleges with deep pockets can hire an unlimited number of behind-the-scenes personnel to compile mountains of data about prep athletes.

And the pockets of those recruiters and assistant coaches are getting deep, as well. A report from USA Today in late 2012 showed that the average assistant football coach now makes a little over $200,000. And just as the head coach’s job depends on his bottom line — wins and losses — the assistant’s job depends on their ability to get players like Smith to sign their names to a National Letter of Intent.
If that world sounds like a frightening place to drop a 16-year-old student into, then you’re in agreement with Sammy Schuster, Smith’s mother.

“I do worry,” she said when asked about the barrage her son faced. At the start of his junior year, a long 15 months ago, Smith had no offers. At the time, they were waiting patiently for someone to notice him.
Once Smith erupted on the scene last year and the offers began pouring in, it got overwhelming.
“At one time he was on the phone all night, every night,” Schuster said. “He would come home from practice exhausted, and spend the next five hours on the phone. As soon as he’d hang up, the phone would be ringing again.”

For a young man who was eager to please, it was hard to say no — that wasn’t something Smith had needed to learn before. As a result, he found himself missing dinners and staying up until the wee hours of the morning working on homework.
Eventually, the excitement wore off. The piles of recruiting mail that arrived every day started getting filed into bags in the order they came in, usually unopened. “And JuJu learned that he didn’t have to answer every call,” said Schuster.
The calls weren’t just coming from coaches, either. The recruiting media — whose jobs depend on breaking stories about players like Smith — were just as persistent, always asking which direction he was leaning.

“It got to where if the number wasn’t already in my phone, I wouldn’t answer it,” said Smith, who couldn’t put an estimate on the number of interviews he’d done in the last year. One of the most recent was with a reporter from the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, who sat down with him in Poly’s football office to ask him about the likelihood of Smith choosing Ohio State.
Those were the contacts that came to Smith’s doorstep, a big enough job for a player who also has a time commitment to his schoolwork and high school team. But there were also the forays he made out of Long Beach and into the world of big-time college football, on official visits to Alabama, Ohio State, Notre Dame and Oregon. He got to attend big-time games (Alabama-LSU, for one) and tour each of the campuses. At one college, he was put into a room with the head coach, his position coach and a recruiting coach, and heavily pressured to commit on the spot.

That was one of the reasons Schuster or her husband Lawrence traveled with her son on his visits, wanting to make sure he had a sounding board and a connection to his home with him, a move she recommends to any other parents of elite athletes.
“It was eye-opening,” she said. “They’re telling your 16-year-old son everything he wants to hear — you can’t expect those kids to go out there and stay level-headed, it’s too much.”
Smith and his family are not naïve about the recruiting process. His uncle, Johnny Nansen, made a good career as an assistant coach at Washington, and has moved with Steve Sarkisian to USC. And the process will be drawn out to the fullest for Smith, as he says he won’t make his decision public until signing day in early February.

“Verbal commitments don’t mean anything, really,” he said. “I don’t want to be one of those kids who commits and decommits — the school I pick will be the one I go to.”
He’s narrowed his list of prospective schools down, with the four that he visited plus UCLA and USC. Schuster said that the family will take Smith’s final official visit to USC on Jan. 17, where they plan to utilize all the knowledge they’ve gained about the process in asking every question possible.
While some see USC as a foregone conclusion, Smith said he and his parents are weighing the best academic opportunity, even if that’s a choice that would take him further away from his tight-knit family. In the end, that’s what this process is about — a high school student who is good enough at football to earn a scholarship choosing where he wants to go to school. The rest is just frosting.

In the recruiting world of 2013, though, the frosting may outweigh the cake. As Schuster pointed out, the day after the 477 pieces of mail from Notre Dame came, the mail carrier was back to work, as another 100-plus letters arrived from a dozen other schools. They went into the bags, unopened, with the others.
“We never would have thought this process would have been stressful,” she said, thinking back to that not-so-long-ago time when her son was waiting for his first offer. “And don’t get me wrong — it’s a blessing, and an honor, and we’re very grateful for the opportunities JuJu is getting. But sometimes, it’s also a little too much.”