I know how tall Jimmy Clausen is. I know what he weighs. I know how fast he runs the 40, and I know how he cuts his hair.
I don't want to know any of that crap.
Jimmy Clausen is a high school senior from Westlake Village, Calif. He's apparently an exceptional football player, but who really knows? Football isn't basketball, where the best high school prospects are so obvious they're ready for not only college, but for the NBA.
Clausen? We'll see. He's a kid, though not as young a kid as you'd think. He started kindergarten late, then repeated sixth grade. These are other things I wish I didn't know about Jimmy Clausen, whose father did the same age-doctoring tricks to older brothers Casey and Rick to develop schoolboy stars. Whatever. Every dad makes his own choices.
But us? We don't have a choice when it comes to high school football. Not any more. The once-humble sport is in our face, and for that we in the media have only one place to blame: we in the media.
Last week's edition of Sports Illustrated came to my house with an unwelcome obscenity: a 12-page high school football preview section. There were the top 20 teams. Players to watch. Games to see. For high school football.
This is a problem. When Sports Illustrated starts to put out a high school preview, mixed in this month with previews of college and pro football, as if it belongs there, high school football has become too big.
I'm not against high school football. Read that sentence again. Not against it. Not at all. High school football is fun to watch, can unite its community and gives young males something positive to do after school and on Friday night. Given the right coaching staff, high school football is fabulous for building character, but what are we building when we put teenagers anywhere near the same pedestal as college and NFL players?
Too many pro athletes are self-absorbed buttheads who live as if they're above the law. Read your local sports section or your local police blotter. Too often they're the same thing. College football, sad to say, isn't a whole lot better. Too many athletes find too much trouble. Is excessive media attention, and the public adulation and scrutiny that come with it, the problem? Not sure, but if I were researching the phenomenon, that's the first place I'd look.
Understand something: For the mistakes of college and NFL players, I don't blame the media. Those athletes are adults. If they can't handle the attention, money, whatever, that comes with the territory, the heck with 'em. Lots of people would love to have been in your once-exalted shoes, ex-Vikings receiver Koren Robinson and ex-Oklahoma quarterback Rhett Bomar. You idiots.
High school kids, for example, would love to be in your shoes. But they're not ready. Would you have been ready back then? Of course not.
Early indications are that Jimmy Clausen isn't ready. The self-absorption normally reserved for college or pro athletes already is protruding from young master Clausen's pores. When he announced in April that he was committing to Notre Dame, Clausen did so at a news conference ... after emerging with his entourage from a stretch Hummer limousine ... at the College Football Hall of Fame. That's in South Bend, Ind. That's almost 2,000 miles from the Clausen home in California.
That's gross.
