Unless you’re a college football junkie, a high school football coach in Southern California, or one of those weirdos who spends entirely too much on Rivals.com’s message boards, chances are pretty good you’ve probably never heard of S’ua Cravens. It’s ok, you’re hardly alone; only the junkiest of all college football junkies knows of Cravens, the top high school safety recruit in the class of 2013, who committed to play at USC this week.

Given Cravens’ stature as an elite prospect, his commitment is plenty newsworthy in its own right, but the real story is what his verbal means to USC “big picture,” where Lane Kiffin is in the process of putting together a class for the ages. Limited to just 15 scholarships because of NCAA sanctions (although you figure Lane Kiffin and Co. will figure out a way to finagle a few more by Signing Day), USC has accumulated so much talent so quickly, that by the time they all sign on the dotted line in February it could down as one of the best classes, player-for-player in the history of recruiting.

As things stand the Trojans have eight total commitments, all of them four-star or above, six who are in ESPNU’s top 80 players, and three of which are ranked as Rivals.com’s Top 10 players in the country nationally. Those three are Cravens, Washington quarterback Max Browne (generally regarded as the best quarterback in the country), and Maryland’s Kenny Bigelow (the best defensive end in the country), and when you factor in two of the top running backs in high school football in Ty Isaac of Illinois and Justin Davis, from Stockton, CA, and elite cornerback Chris Hawkins, it’s easy to see why everyone around the program is excited for the future. And the scary thing is the Trojans are hardly done, and are still involved with a handful of other elite recruits.

Safe to say, it’s a good to Lane Kiffin. And he’s hardly the only one cleaning up early.

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Like the rest of you, I was stunned- I mean, absolutely stunned- to hear the news of former West Virginia coach Bill Stewart’s passing yesterday afternoon. It was the kind of information you see come across the wire, look at, process, look at again and then double-check to see if somehow you’ve misread something.

Bill Stewart? The football coach? Is dead? No, it can’t be true.

Only it is, with the timing and circumstances the most shocking part of all. The guy was seemingly healthy (he was playing golf at the time of his heart attack), relatively young (at just 59) and was a part of our everyday lives as college football fans as recently as a year ago. He wasn’t some coaching legend dropping dead after years of retirement obscurity. This news didn’t come after a long battle with an incurable illness. This was Bill Stewart- the guy who drove us nuts as college football fans every Saturday as recently as two years ago- being taken from us far too soon. The news is as sad, as sad gets.

With the information now a few hours old, and folks starting to share their stories, most every Bill Stewart obituary starts off by talking about Bill Stewart the person, not the football coach. Ask anyone who knew Stewart, and they’ll tell you he was a good guy, no, a great guy, in a profession that’s filled with barely any of them. In an off-season where Bobby Petrino got fired for literally riding into the sunset with a woman who wasn’t his wife, the “worst” things Stewart was known for (mainly, boneheaded decisions on Saturdays) really seem kind of trivial, don’t they?

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Over at the college football website I run, CrystalBallRun.com, I brought up what I thought to be a very interesting talking point yesterday afternoon: Has USC’s Pat Haden evolved into the best Athletic Director in college sports? Well, after thinking about it some more last night, doing some research, and talking to a few folks who’ve spent time around USC’s athletic department, I’ve decided to take this conversation one step further and say this: As of right now, Pat Haden is the best AD in college sports. Period. End of story. Thanks for coming, and drive home safely.

Phew, I’m glad we got that out of the way. And now that we have come to the broad, big picture conclusion of this article, let’s work our backward to the beginning, to see how we got there.

Of course before I get started, I should get one pretty big caveat out of the way: I do understand that in this case, “the best” is something that’s impossible to prove. It’s impossible to say that Haden is the “best” AD in college sports right now, in the same way it’s impossible to say that Nike makes the “best” shoes, pecan is the “best” pie, or that Kourtney is the “best” Kardashian sister. I may think it. I may feel it in my gut. But it is impossible to prove, especially with so many other really good AD’s out there. You know the names just like I do, and as college athletic departments have evolved into the multi-million dollar corporations that they are today, the men and women who are running them have evolved just the same. Guys like Mal Moore at Alabama, Jeremy Foley at Florida and DeLoss Dodds at Texas, are as bright and intelligent as anyone, in any field.

Then again when it comes to Haden and all his contemporaries, there is one major difference between the USC AD and everyone else: All of the others I just mentioned either walked into an already good job and made it great, or took a great job and made it elite. But Haden? He walked into the Roman empire, but did so after the fall had already begun.

On Saturday, the never-ending Ferris wheel ride that is college football realignment took another spin, when more rumors surfaced about a heavy flirtation between Florida State and the Big XII Conference. The news hit with a flash, and only got flashier when a high-ranking Board of Trustees member as well as FSU head football coach Jimbo Fisher both made public statements supporting the school’s effort to look outside the ACC. And when those comments hit, well my goodness did it cause an uproar; on Twitter, message boards, and every strange internet outpost in between.

There was one place that the news fell on mostly deaf ears though. That place? My house.

That’s right. You better believe I saw the news, and rather than sprinting to my computer to learn the facts, instead let the news roll off my back like water at the local pool. I didn’t click on any links, didn’t read any message boards and didn’t call up any friends in Tallahassee looking for the inside scoop. Instead, I caught a couple of Josh Hamilton’s at-bats that afternoon, readied for Game 7 of Nuggets-Lakers, and spent the rest of the evening enjoying life’s simple pleasures, like purchasing an overpriced drink at Starbucks and battling a couple haggard, middle-aged men for the last few Mother’s Day cards at Walgreens. To quote the movie “Old School” it really was a “nice, little Saturday.”

And ironically my apathy to the whole situation wasn’t planned. It wasn’t some deep-rooted, passive-aggressive stand against the powers that be in college football or anything like that (like they would’ve cared), but instead, the truth lies in a simple realization I came to while sipping on the mocha-frappa-whatchamacallit I bought at Starbucks.

That truth? I simply don’t care about college football realignment anymore.

Look, I’ll be honest: When you write about sports for a living, eventually, everything starts to run together. The players, the games, the seasons, the scandals, whatever, at some point you realize that they’re all basically the same. Sure, some ancillary facts might get changed up, and yes, there’s a reasonable chance that Todd Graham is working somewhere different than he was a year ago. But at the end of the day, 2011 wasn’t all that much different than 2010, and 2010 was a lot like 2009.

And nowhere is that more apparent than in spring, college football, where every year, every storyline is exactly the same. Everybody has a new coach or a new coordinator or a new quarterback, and everybody is just trying to get better every day. Blah, blah, blah… just tell me when I actually get to watch someone hit someone else. Know what I’m saying?

But in all seriousness, that’s kind of a reality I came to this spring: Every spring football camp, is the same. Something might be happening at Alabama, but if you changed a few names around, it could just as easily be happening at Auburn or Tennessee or UCLA or Ohio State.

At the end of the day, we read and write about the same handful of generic story angles, and generic storylines every single spring, with every single team. They never change, regardless of the season, coach or program.

Therefore, to save you some time, I’ve just gone ahead and rounded up all the generic spring stereotypes, and put them into one, easy to consume article here. And just for fun, you can go ahead and look at your own team, and see which of your players fit in as well. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below as well or on Twitter @Aaron_Torres.

Enjoy.

On Tuesday night, University of Arkansas Athletics Director Jeff Long fired head football coach Bobby Petrino. He used a 660 word pre-prepared speech, but what his decision came down to was one phrase, in one, well-worded sentence of that speech. The sentence read as follows:

In short, Coach Petrino engaged in a pattern of misleading and manipulative behavior designed to deceive me and members or the athletics’ staff both before and after the motorcycle accident.

Read that again.

“Coach Petrino engaged in a pattern of manipulative behavior”--- stop right there. You hear that? "pattern?” That’s the money word right there, the smoking gun, the judge, jury and prosecution to close out this case.

And in the end, it’s that one phrase “pattern of manipulative behavior” is why Bobby Petrino is unemployed today. He wasn’t fired for lying about a motorcycle crash on April 1. He wasn’t fired because he had an extramarital affair with a woman who was literally half his age. He wasn’t even fired for acting selfishly and putting life, career, marriage and the livelihood of others on the line. Instead, he was fired for the web of lies and deceit that somehow tied it all together, starting well before the crash on April 1, and ending with Petrino on the chopping block Tuesday night.

For those of you who may have missed it, it was a heck of a Thursday night in Fayetteville, Arkansas. No, I’m not talking about the drink specials down at the biggest bar on campus, but instead what’s going on inside Arkansas’ football program right now. To call it a “mess” would be an understatement; this is the BP oil-spill come to college football.

In the case of Arkansas, that “BP” is their head football coach Bobby Petrino, and oh my, what a situation did he get himself into this week. Because it’s Good Friday, and because you’ve got better things to do, let’s cut through the crap and get right to the facts:

On Monday it was revealed that Petrino had gotten himself in a motorcycle accident. The coach ended up with a few major injuries, but nothing life threatening. At the time, the school released a statement that Petrino was ok. The statement also said that Petrino was alone when the bike accident happened.

That last nugget is where things get interesting, since a police report came out Thursday afternoon that revealed that Petrino did in fact have a passenger with him on the bike. That alone is bad enough, if only because it proved that he lied to his superiors. It doesn’t matter who you are, or how many games you’ve won. You never, ever want to do that.

As I mentioned on Thursday, if you’re looking for hard-hitting coverage in the lead-up to next week’s National Signing Day, well, Aaron Torres Sports might not totally be the place for you. There are only so many hours in the day, and less time I spend using those hours to learn about 17-year-old high school football players, the better off we all are. Just trust me on that one.

But while I’ll be the first to admit that I have little interest in learning about high school football players, I’m proud to report that I have no problem taking thinly-veiled shots at the men who’ll coach them in college.

That’s why yesterday, I broke out the first half of my “Fake Recruiting Pitches,” chronicling what I believe to be the most outlandish ways that the coaches of the SEC, Pac-12 and Big East would try to land recruits, and convince them to come to their schools.

Well, today I am back with Part II: Looking at the coaches of the Big Ten, Big XII and ACC.

As always, along with my own recruiting pitches, I encourage you to share your own, in the comments section.

Now, let’s get to the pitches:

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I’m just going to be real with you here for a second: If you’re looking for some quality college football recruiting coverage, Aaron Torres Sports simply is not the place for you (although, we are doing some things at the other site I work for, CrystalBallRun.com). I’m not saying I’m a busy guy per se, but the idea of tracking a bunch of 17-year-old kids, more than half of which will never make any tangible impact on the college level, just doesn’t sound all that appealing to me. Especially when I’ve got more important things to do… like watch re-runs of How I Met Your Mother, for example.

Still, this whole recruiting frenzy does kind of make me wonder, and think how much fun it’d be to be a recruited athlete. Beyond just the bags of cash, free trips and endless girls (boooooring), I’m always curious what it’d be like to have a Nick Saban or Lane Kiffin in your house, pitching the merits of their school to you. What would they say? How would they act? Do you think Les Miles likes dogs?

Which is why in the lead-up Signing Day, I’ve decided to do something different here at ATS. Rather than pretend like I know a damn thing about any of these recruits, I’m going to instead focus on the guys that I do know, the coaches. And in one paragraph or less, I’m going to try my best to sum up what I think they might say, and what their top selling points might be.

In Part I today, I’ll look at the coaches of the SEC, Pac-12 and Big East and tomorrow I encourage you to come back with Part II, evaluating those from the ACC, Big Ten and Big XII.

Here goes:

It was right around this time four months ago that I was putting the finishing touches on my book ‘The Unlikeliest Champion.’ For those of you who know nothing about the book (or likely about me), it is about the UConn men’s basketball team and their National Championship last March, and as I finished it up this past fall, I was looking for one final quote to really sum up the entire season as a whole. To give such an unexpected championship some broader, “big picture” perspective.

That quote eventually came to me from a guy named Leo Papile. Papile is a legendary figure on the Boston hoops scene, an AAU coach who has sent more guys to college than the G.I. Bill, and someone who has forgotten more basketball in the last week than most “analysts” on TV have learned in a lifetime. He’s also one of UConn head coach Jim Calhoun’s oldest friends, going back over 30 years, way before the TV cameras, National Championships and Hall of Fame speeches Calhoun has become famous for now.

When I asked Papile what the 2011 championship meant to Calhoun’s legacy, he said something so elegant, it practically brought tears to my eyes.

This quote is straight from my book (available on Amazon.com by the way!):

“Through the years Jimmy’s best teams would out-work you, out-tough you, out-compete you,” Leo Papile, Calhoun’s friend, dating back 30 years to their days in Boston said. “That’s exactly what that team was all about. It was his perfect team. This was Jimmy’s masterpiece.”

His “masterpiece.” How beautiful, huh?

And as I watched last night’s BCS National Championship, I couldn’t help but think back to that quote.