Bronco on the recruiting process

BYU coach Bronco Mendenhall was asked Wednesday about recruiting — how he feels about a high school player calling a press conference to announce which school he’s committing to, months before he starts his senior year.

Of course, quarterback Jake Heaps did just that last June.

Here’s Mendenhall’s response:

“It’s a new era. There’s a lot about today’s recruiting that I’m not so comfortable about. Without going into much detail, just the attention placed on it. One of my main concerns is, in an ideal world to me, young men would actually come and try out or try to convince the coach at a school where they really would love to attend why they should be given a chance on the team. That’s why I like walk-ons so much. They know exactly why they’re going to that school and they’re so passionate about it. When you consider a young man going to some remote place in the country just to play football … there’s a level of exploitation that starts fitting into that, in my view.”

“Young men now are coming in a lot more entitled than they’ve what they’ve ever been. There’s All-Star games on TV, there’s this All-Star camp … press conferences for freshmen who haven’t played a down yet in college. If you could have been at the first day of off-season workouts when those young men arrived, there wasn’t any press conference. They didn’t have enough oxygen to speak. Now they’re having to live up to all the attention and they’re just freshmen. They’re just high school kids. They’re been blown up into a commodity that is marketable. The parents are also getting caught up in the intoxication of the attention. I enjoy, in a twisted sort of way, watching them run their first gasser and being 25 yards behind the slowest guy on our team and realizing they have a ways to go. Now, they’re teachable. Before that, it’s very difficult to teach when everyone is telling them how great they are. That part, in and of itself, and my own personality, I’m having a hard time reconciling currently.”