the recruit: Ryan Cobb

Name: Ryan Cobb
Position: ILB
School: Don Bosco (NJ)
Height: 6'0"
Weight: 215

ESPN: 73
Rivals: NR
Scout: NR

For those who follow recruiting like it's their job, because it is their job, Ryan Cobb is a familiar name; Don Bosco has a football machine and when you stand out there, it's hard not to get noticed. Cobb is a two-way player there at linebacker and tight end - he's athletic and talented, and has been racking up various camp MVP awards ever since he was a freshman. All the usual suspect schools have been recruiting him for quite some time now - you don't even need a Rivals subscription to look at his page there and see where he's been visiting: Notre Dame, Iowa, Rutgers. He's got the profile of a kid who we'd have to battle the Penn States, Boston Colleges, and Marylands of the world for, and battle hard.

Smart? probably, with Stanford and Notre Dame and such after him. Athletic? definitely - if you play both ways, your athleticism isn't in question. Talented? more than likely, if you think all those camps mean anything. So why have the services not bothered to rate hims, and why, at the time of his visit and commitment in June before his senior year, does he hold exactly four offers, none of which besides ours would you call competitive? Navy, Harvard, and Yale, to be precise. Harvard and Yale - so, change "probably" to "definitely" after "smart?" then.

Well, I don't know. But I suspect. Take a look at this camp rundown, where Cobb earned the linebacker MVP nod, and check out his listed size: 6'0, 210. Fast forward two summers - that is from May 2007, when Cobb had just finished his freshman year - and he's still listed in the 210s. Sometimes the low 220s, but he hasn't grown an inch upward, either. I'm gonna hazard a guess that much of this early attention assumed that he'd follow a normal growth curve, which might put him around 6'2 or 6'3, 225-230 by now. This he is not. If he were on the roster right now he'd be the shortest linebacker there, and be competing for the title of lightest with Steve Greer.

Ah, but there you go: Greer, despite being listed at 218 pounds and being a redshirt freshman (I doubt he's that light, but whatever) is a very strong contender for a starting spot on the inside. Cobb's size indicates a near-certain redshirt in 2010, but his pedigree indicates he'll be right in the mix when it's his turn. Might well be that we're hearing in a few years another one of those stories announcers like to tell where the undersized kid just needed one coach to believe in him blah blah blah - if so, enjoy it, because it'll be another piece of evidence on the giant pile of proof that Al Groh knows what he's doing when he's evaluating linebackers.