Why you shouldn't tap the brakes on enthusiasm for football recruiting

Yes, it's ordinarily a big personal pet peeve when I read a columnist or hear a pundit tell fans how they ought to feel about something. Someone who is supposed to be an objective media person (i.e. not a fan) may understand very well the facts of a given situation. They may arrive at a very rational conclusion about this, that or most points of dispute.

But what a supposedly objective person (whether truly objective or striving for objectivity) can rarely do is to truly understand the subjective experience of a fan (which is short, as I often point out, for fanatic).

That's why I said I understood the frustration of many Kentucky fans over the ongoing Hamidou Diallo saga. While saying there's no cause for anger directed at Diallo or John Calipari, and while acknowledging that both parties have operated in a completely reasonable, respectable, understandable fashion, I still get the frustration. That's all. Because you're fans and you just want, on a visceral level, what's best for the program. Even if it sometimes flies in the face of the facts of a case. Fanatics often take facts into account, but it's almost impossible to bury emotions.

Facts never completely shape what we believe or what we hope for. Never. Facts, to varying degrees, should help to shape our convictions and our views. But as humans they never do, and in most cases they shouldn't. They are and should be balanced by other considerations, like self-interest, the good of the group, the good of others, a healthy skepticism and a range of other factors that don't show up on scales or measures.

There are some, perhaps many, fans who have said to "tap the brakes" on enthusiasm following Rivals100 offensive/defensive lineman Marquan McCall's commitment to Kentucky.

Rewind to earlier tonight: The top-ranked player in the state of Michigan committed to Mark Stoops rather than Jim Harbaugh.

Yes, there's a long way to go.

Yes, Kentucky has seen plenty of decommitments (as has almost every other program) in the recent past.

Yes, there have been high profile cases of fans getting their hopes up, only to have those hopes dashed.

But here's why it doesn't make any sense to tap the brakes on enthusiasm in a, "Wait 'til Signing Day," approach.

Because the odds have been, are and probably always will be stacked against Kentucky climbing to the top of the SEC ladder and the only conceivable path to actually shattering the perceived ceiling is by doing the unthinkable.

Had you told fans before Stoops' hiring that the 2014 class would be ranked No. 1 in the country into the early fall, most wouldn't have believed it. Had you told them that Kentucky would have defeated Heisman Trophy winner Lamar Jackson on his home field, the 28-point line would have laughed at you in the face.

Stoops has won seven games one time in a season, yes, so don't imagine more progress than has really been made.

But the only way for Kentucky to really break through in football is to do things that seem unlikely or impossible.

And isn't that hope why you're a fan? If you have consigned yourself to rooting for a team that will never sign "this player," or will never win "that game," or will never have "that kind of season," then why are you wasting your time?

Chances are, if you're reading this then you're a fanatic, i.e. a fan, on some level. When Kentucky took the field against Alabama in Tuscaloosa last fall you were probably thrilled when the Cats took a 3-0 lead early in the game and played competitively for most of a half. It was extremely unlikely that Kentucky was going to win that game, but what fan wouldn't allow himself to get excited about that? If you're that kind of fan, you probably didn't enjoy the 43-37 win over LSU in 2007 very much, or at least you didn't until the final tackle of the game.

The only way Kentucky will ever do what you want Kentucky do in football is to do things that very few people outside of the Kentucky fan base believes they can do. Stoops has already done some of those things. So why not allow yourself to believe where others don't?

There's a place for objectivity, for level-headedness, and for caution. But there's also a very real place for simply being a fan.

There's another reason for fans to throw inhibition to the wind and give themselves over to long-shot expectations when it comes to recruiting. A big part of recruiting is momentum, and a big part of momentum is tone. The better the tone, the more the momentum. Coaches sense it, players sense it, recruits sense it.

Finally, there's this: It's a lot more reasonable to have runaway enthusiastic expectations and hopes for recruiting than it is (or was, rather) to pack Commonwealth Stadium to watch Kentucky teams take on Florida, Tennessee or Alabama, when the odds of victory were extremely slim.

Please note, that's not a criticism of fan turnout for those games. You're supposed to turn out, even if the odds are bad and the deck is stacked. But if you don't have the horses, more often than not, the game is set against you. Recruiting is where the magic happens. It's where things change.

Now react how you will.