In the old days of football recruiting, it was just us. The newspapers.

We drew up the blue-chip lists. We followed the courtships. We trumpeted the successes.

It was fun. It was distasteful. It was much ado about nothing.

And about everything, if you followed college football.

Now, alas, there are so-called recruiting gurus, recruiting magazines and recruiting Web sites, like Scout.com and Rivals.com, that feed fans' and alumni's boundless thirsts for signing information.

Yet, the song and dance haven't changed much. The business of getting capable student-athletes to play football at your university is still a wrenching, inexact science.

Coach February? Try Coach June.

By the first week of June 2008, Texas' Mack Brown had received oral commitments from 19 prospective Longhorns. The commitments weren't binding, but Brown's smooth prowess in luring recruits to Austin has earned him his nickname_and, lately, BCS bowls.

Texas and Southern Cal, arguably, fall into that unique category of not so much having to recruit high school standouts but merely having to identify and invite the right ones.

Must be nice. For the rest of the college football world, the day will be spent with cellphones and fax machines humming and assistant coaches scattered throughout their respective states.

At the big schools, there will be National Signing Day rallies, complete with cheerleaders, the school band and a late-afternoon cameo from the head coach himself. Some players' announcements will be televised live Wednesday on ESPN.

And we wonder why some of them grow up thinking they can get away with anything?

It all begins with the list. The Top 100 list. The Fab 55. Whatever we choose to call it.

As the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Trae Thompson explained, more or less, the paper's recruiting lists are carefully crafted rankings formulated only after collecting exhaustive firsthand information and weighing multiple evaluation sources.

There is youtube.com, in other words. But there's still no scientific formula.

True story: Long ago, a close friend that I grew up with made his hometown newspaper's all-city team as a senior. The problem was, the newspaper inadvertently listed him as a junior.

No colleges called. When he finally phoned a coach in late spring, my friend was told that he was on the list to scout for the next season, his "senior" season. He ended up at a junior college.

That would never happen today, of course. Mack Brown would have already contacted him_in junior high.

Look at all the NFL draft choices who don't pan out. Think of all the college football games that are on television and the money that NFL teams spend on scouting, and yet they still make mistakes.

Now, take an exponentially broader pool of football players and make them four or five years younger, and you'll have an idea of the crapshoot that college coaches have to annually go through.

Two enterprising reporters tried to numerically evaluate the process Tuesday. Scott Kennedy of SuperPrep.com took the recruiting class rankings of Scout.com for 2005 through 2008 and compared them to the schools' winning percentages and final Associated Press rankings.

In the cumulative recruiting rankings, USC was No. 1, followed in order by Florida, Michigan, Georgia, Texas, LSU and Ohio State. Oklahoma was No. 11. Texas A&M's recruiting classes ranked 17th.

The only notable high over-achiever in the rankings from 2005-08 was West Virginia (sixth in the polls, unranked in the recruiting lists). TCU made it to 13th in the cumulative polls and was also unranked in recruiting.

Another story by the AP's Ralph Russo on Tuesday in which he compared recruiting class rankings from 2004-06 produced mostly the same results.

Namely, they showed that while a school doesn't need to have a Top 10-ranked recruiting class to be ultra-successful, it's not a bad place to start.

Not all that long ago, a sportswriter on the recruiting beat would go to the local college football coach before compiling his Top 50 or 100 list. "Here," the writer would tell the coach. "Write down about 30 names. I'll fill in the rest."

The lists are still just lists.

Yet, grown adults will wail Wednesday. Cheerleaders will cheer.

All because some 17-year-old has decided where he wants — or doesn't want — to go to college.

It's much ado about nothing. And about everything.