Eventually, doctors in the maternity ward are going to be asking college coaches like Nick Saban and Les Miles to give mothers a little space when their sons are coming out of the womb. Yes, that’s an exaggeration. But how young is too young for an athlete to be recruited to play a sport in college? For many coaches, the answer to that question is younger than 13 years old.
On Saturday, the defending national champion Crimson Tide extended a scholarship offer to an eight-grader from Baton Rouge named Dylan Moses. If you feel as though Saban should not be offering children who are that young a scholarship, you have an even bigger bone to pick with Miles. Moses received an offer from LSU last summer.
“For Dylan, excitement spilled over,” the boy’s father, Edward Moses Jr., said according to ESPN.com. “When he heard those words from Coach [Nick] Saban, ‘We’re offering you,’ you could see him light up. It was shocking because we were going in thinking we were just going to get a tour of what Alabama has to offer.
“To hear, ‘You’re impressive, keep your grades up, we want you to come here, and we’re offering you a scholarship now,’ I can’t even put that into words.”
As you can see from the video above, Moses is clearly ahead of the curve from a talent standpoint. He already stands 6-foot-1 and weighs 215 pounds, which means he’s going to have plenty of size by the time he graduates high school in 2017. We have seen 13-year-old and 14-year-old quarterbacks commit to Division-I football schools before, so it’s not unheard of. While planning for the future is always a good thing, it’s important to make sure kids can still be kids.
“The attention from those levels of institutions, No. 1 and No. 2 in the SEC and arguably in the country, he feels like a boss, like he’s untouchable,” Dylan’s father said. “We have to bring him back on down to earth, let him know that he still has to do his work down here to make sure that dream comes true.”
When a kid is receiving the same offers as future NFL stars who are 18 years old, remaining grounded can’t be an easy task.
