If I've only learned one thing during a 25 year period of being a recruiting junkie....it is rare, rare, rare....that it's foreseeable that any one high school player coming or not coming will make a damned bit of difference. There are only two players out of my relatively recent memory that I recall that truly fit into that category and those are Vince and Adrian Peterson (I know there were others).
The other thing I see is that fans very often lament over the ones we didn't get that turned out to be exceptional.. which is quite clear in hindsight but not foresight..but those same fans rarely spend much time calculating how many "can't miss guys" we got (or didn't) that were nothing more than average.
My point is that it doesn't matter much to me whether we get Porter or not. He's most definitely NOT a player that fits into the category of Vince Young or Adrian Peterson. He's simply one of those guys that may turn into all-world but could just as easily turn into average joe. It's a crap shoot.
It is interesting that you read a recruiting thread before posting that.
Recruiting is what began most of these boards and, I would guess, still sustains them, free or pay.
I was thinking about that the other day -- Before the internet, I was living on the East Coast and was desperate for UT recruiting info but it was sparse. Mostly it was newspapers which were hard for me to get my hands on and even then, the info was limited and behind. The magazines at that time were pretty good but, of course, not timely. I knew a guy who worked in Belmont but limited my calls to him as I didn't want him to get in trouble (+ he was always unrealistically optimistic thinking every Texas kid ever born wanted to play for UT). One of my few options was to call the ever slower talking Jerry Scarborough's pay-by-the-minute 1-900 line. When the phone bill came, my housemates always cackled, convinced I had some kind of kinky "Orange" phone sex fetish thing going on. It was a ridiculous set-up but there were few reasonable options.
Then there was dial up internet. For me, that was the second half of the 1990s sometime. That first board I recall was called Austin 360? I think. Or maybe not. Who here remembers? What I do recall is that it was pretty wild and uncensored. I specifically remember this one salty old poster with a huge ego who claimed he was a former LB. He really hated it when someone disagreed with him (on anything) and would regularly challenge other posters to come meet him for a fistfight. I kid not. I wish I could recall his username. The biggest argument back then was usually about John Mackovic.
But the maintenance became too much for whoever started that site and, of course, some other people came along and figured they could make some money off all of this stuff -- thus, Hornfans was born. They basically took all the posters with them. Then the pay sites began to pop up everywhere. And so on.
Anyway, good on you if you really can simply chillax, not worry about recruiting and wait to see the results on the field. But, as the amount of pay sites covering this topic show, there is a huge crowd UT fans who cannot or will not do that.
