People think that college recruits are these sharp individuals who don’t make mistakes. They’re on top of everything. Except no they’re not. They’re human like everybody else. They make mistakes. Or more specifically, they cut corners. Proof of this centers around new Chicago Bears running back David Montgomery.
When somebody takes the time to watch him on tape, they’re left with a clear question. Why did this guy go to Iowa State? It feels like he should’ve gone to a more prominent program. Was it a legacy thing? Did family go there? Nope. It just turns out that was one of the better schools to offer him a scholarship.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense. Backs of his talent tend to always go to top programs like Ohio State or Alabama. That is until you hear the story his Iowa State running backs coach Nate Scheelhaase had to say regarding how he was snagged in the first place.
David Montgomery high school unique highlight tape cost him college chances
Scheelhaase sat down to speak with Rich Campbell of the Chicago Tribune to talk about Montgomery, both in terms of his exploits on the field and his future in Chicago. When the conversation came around to the rookie’s vision as a runner, the coach steered things towards how he was recruited.
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“Speaking of his high school tape, his senior year tape is fun to watch. It’s really, really long — like, 20 minutes. The reason I think David wasn’t highly recruited is most high schoolers put their very best highlights as the first highlight…
…David did his just in chronological order. So his first highlight is a good run, an 8-yard gain. But 14 minutes in, there are incredible runs. At the 12-minute mark, there’s this nasty run. It’s really interesting to watch.
If you watch the whole 20 minutes — what I always think is people were lazy when recruiting him and didn’t watch the whole thing. They saw the first few highlights and were like, ‘Ah, this guy is pretty good.’ If you watch the whole tape, it would shock you that he wasn’t recruited by the top-five programs in the country.”
Some might say this was David’s error for not doing it the traditional way. Then again, if recruiters can’t be bothered to take 20 minutes of their lives to watch the full video to make sure they’re not missing something? That’s on them. Hell, just fast forward in chunks to see if anything pops up.
Watching for 2-3 minutes and then making a determination is the equivalent of reading the first two or three chapters of a book and declaring whether it’s a classic or a piece of trash. It proves that all those programs who did that didn’t deserve Montgomery. He went to where he belonged.
Now he’s a Bear.
