Unlike most high school students, Darron Thomas isn’t stressing over a date to prom. He is a quarterback, after all. The bigger problem is he’s in Oregon while his high school prom is in Texas. He needs a plane ticket more than anything else – he’s already in college and training with the football team.
“Graduate early. Play early,” Thomas said.
Thomas is one of a growing number of football recruits who leave high school early to enroll in college. Some believe arriving early will give them an academic head start and a better chance of starting as Division I freshman. But those hopes are not always realized.
In 2007, Bowl Championship Series schools had 69 recruits arriving to college early, an increase of nearly 100 percent from 2004, USA Today reported. This year a quarter of Boise State’s recruits are already on campus, including one who made a last-minute decision to graduate early and was enrolled a week later.
College coaches stress that they don’t advocate recruits to enroll early, as not to appear they are forcing them out of high school and rushing them into college. Oregon coach Mike Bellotti listed three high school recruits who were set to arrive early this year but said it’s always a family decision that the coaches don’t take any part in.
“Your senior year of high school ought to be the most fun time in your life,” Bellotti said. “They feel like the early jump is going to allow them a better opportunity to play, which is probably true, but it’s a big jump.”
But Bellotti says he doesn’t turn them away from it.

“If they’re going to go, they’re going to go, so you make that available to them,” he said. “If you don’t, then you missed that opportunity (to recruit them).”
By Bellotti’s count, he’s had six recruits arrive early while he’s been the head coach at Oregon, including this year.
Texas coach Mack Brown has said he discourages early arrivals and won’t let a recruit enroll early unless the player, his family and his high school coach all agree on the idea.
Yet despite his stance on the issue, Brown had six recruits arrive early in 2007. The entire Pacific-10 Conference had four.
Illinois coach Ron Zook, an advocate of early recruits, has seven enrolled this winter, more than the previous three years combined. He believes getting recruits in early allows them to adjust to their academic studies easier.
“To me there’s no question it’s a great asset, particularly for school and learning the intensity you have in the classroom,” Zook told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “They already understand a little of the athletic competition but not necessarily the academic pressure. It doesn’t matter where they’re from. College is different.”
Still, some coaches are trying to decide whether or not having recruits arrive early is a good idea. Bellotti said there is a surprisingly high number of recruits who arrive early and end up transferring.
“Young men today want to play immediately,” he said. “They don’t want to sit, wait, redshirt. If they don’t have immediate gratification, sometimes they’re going to leave. You always worry about that if they’re going to see or have enough success down the road to be happy.
The recruits also tend to arrive individually and can’t typically attach themselves to the group of players who arrived before or after them.
“They become disenfranchised,” Bellotti said. “They’re in between classes.”
That was the case with Oregon in 2004 when quarterback recruit Johnny DuRocher arrived in the spring of 2003. DuRocher came ahead of Dennis Dixon and Brady Leaf but fell behind on the depth chart and transferred to Washington in 2004.
Bellotti said he talked to DuRocher about Oregon’s switch to the spread offense, telling DuRocher he would need to adjust his playing style if he was going to see the field.
“He just wanted to play and realized he was in for some stiff competition,” Bellotti said.
Feeling jilted by the Ducks, DuRocher and his dad said they burned all the Duck memorabilia they owned.
“The jury’s still out on people arriving early,” Oregon wide receivers coach Robin Pflugrad said. “Is the reward better? I just don’t know yet.”

The latest early Oregon recruits

Thomas, the quarterback, and his roommate, safety John Boyett, from Napa, Calif., are among the latest additions to Oregon’s roster. While the previous early arrivals have enrolled in April at Oregon, the pair are the first recruits to enroll two terms early at Oregon, according to Bellotti.

Both said they came to Oregon early to get a jump-start on football and get some freshman requirements in the classroom out of the way.
“I thought that if I got up here early, it would be an easier transition from high school to college,” Boyett said.
Both also hope that by arriving early they can bypass a season without seeing the field.
“I don’t want to redshirt,” Thomas said, adding the coaches have told him he has a chance to start at quarterback.
Thomas is on the fast track: after graduating from high school early, he said he hopes to do the same in college. He looks to follow the example set by Dixon, who graduated before his senior season.
“If I can get all of my first-term classes out of the way, I’ll have more credits in – 40 more than the people coming in the fall,” Thomas said. “That’s three terms ahead of everybody else.”
But Thomas faces the same situation that DuRocher did. He will compete for the starting job with incoming freshmen Chris Harper, a quarterback from Wichita, Kan., who also enrolled early this spring as well as Oregon’s other returning quarterbacks.
In Thomas’ mind, he will always be competing for playing time. In that sense, Bellotti isn’t worried about one of his early recruits transferring.
“Competition is the best
thing for the position,” he said, adding that the Oregon quarterbacks are “great athletes that could play a lot of different places.”
Meanwhile, sophomore wide receiver Drew Davis, who arrived at Oregon last spring, said he wanted to enroll early since his sophomore year in high school.
“I just wanted to get acclimated to college. I felt that I had done everything I needed to do in high school,” Davis said. “The only thing I needed to go back to was my graduation and my prom, which I did.
“In high school, everything was coming too easy. After I did come to college, I was real happy about it.”
Pflugrad, Davis’ position coach, thinks Davis came in unprepared for some aspects of college athletics. Davis wasn’t in great physical condition when he started spring drills and struggled early on.
“I think he was really overwhelmed at first,” Pflugrad said. “The first thing they see is that the game is a lot faster. It’s a shock to the system because they’re always playing catch-up.”
Without other early freshmen there, the adjustment process becomes harder because they’re learning right from the beginning of everything without someone to bounce ideas off of, as Pflugrad put it.
But as Davis adjusted to college life, things got easier. When Oregon needed some of the reserve receivers to play this fall, Davis was able to step in because of the learning process he went through in the spring. Pflugrad said Davis wasn’t making the mistakes that freshmen typically make.
The early playing time made Davis’ decision all the better, though his happiness wasn’t entirely dependent on playing right away. While it worked out for him, it’s not something every recruit should consider doing, even if it would guarantee playing time. Not everyone is ready for college right away, Davis said.
“It would vary by the individual. It’s something you can’t really predict with a whole group of people,” he said. “You would have to look at the individual and see what their characteristics are.”
As for Thomas and Boyett, Pflugrad said that the two are in it together and are able to learn from each other.
“They have a street sense. They don’t seem to be homesick,” Pflugrad said.

Early recruits benefit academically

As for the academic side of arriving early, Jennie Leander, the associate director at Oregon’s Services for Student Athletes, sees pros and cons for early enrollment.

“It’s an advantage and a disadvantage; their peers can help them and offer them advice,” she said. “But a disadvantage, in that, everyone else’s mode is midyear as opposed to ‘Hey, I’m just starting.’”
The problem is that the newest freshmen are expected to adapt with their classmates almost instantly without that gradual adjustment process.
“Everyone else has hit the ground running and they’re expected to be in the fold with the rest of the freshmen. These guys just need to get it and go,” Leander said.
Thomas and Boyett have both have been “exceptional” according to Leander. But for recruits who are motivated enough to graduate early, their academic prowess should almost be expected.
“Most of the time they’re pretty exceptional, in that, they’ve graduated high school early. So they clearly have a history of academic success. The guys that are coming in are more than capable and are doing a good job of absorbing.”
Leander said there is an advantage to arriving early for recruits, who can adjust to the academics without the rigorous practice schedule and the distraction of a game every week during football season. If they’re here early, the idea is that they can better adjust to academics.
“When they get to fall term, they’re better able to manage their time and prioritize,” she said.

Is it worth it?

Bellotti and Pflugrad acknowledged that for most recruits, their football career is better served if they arrive early, though it also depends on what position they play.
“In the long run, it’s better to arrive early,” Pflugrad said, citing that quarterbacks would be the ones to benefit the most.
But with that, he and Bellotti said the best time to arrive would be June, followed by January, then April, saying that the winter workouts are informal and don’t tax a player physically as much as spring drills.
As more recruits are deciding to enroll in college as soon as possible, Pflugrad hopes that it doesn’t become a requirement for players to arrive early to ensure they play as soon as possible. There’s so much they’re missing as a result.
“You take things away from them,” Pflugrad said. “Go live your life. Enjoy it.”
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