Introducing Adopt-A-Player

I come from a huge family. I’m the youngest of 13 kids (no, seriously!) and sports were always a big part of our daily lives. It was not uncommon for us to get together with cousins and neighbor kids for an impromptu pick-up game of softball or football. Most of us were also active in high school sports – football, wrestling, basketball, track & field – but none of us ever took sports beyond high school. How cool would it have been to have a family member play for a D1 college or professional team? That’s the idea behind Football Weblog’s Adopt-a-Player.

Each year, recruiting services identify the top high school football prospects in the nation. Of course, these highly sought-after gridders inevitably commit to playing with the best college teams in the nation, and some go on to play at the professional level. In Adopt-a-Player, I’ll randomly select one of the top 50 player prospects to call our own and follow his career all along the way. With any luck, we’ll stumble across the next Heisman Trophy winner or, if the football gods really shine on us, a player that will eventually slip on a gold Pro Football Hall of Fame jacket.

Adopt-a-Player will be an annual event. Each year, I’ll randomly pick another gridder to adopt and call our own. Eventually, after a few years, we’ll have an entire family of talented young players to watch and cheer for as their football careers unfold.

I’ll limit each selection to only skill position players – quarterbacks, wide receivers, running backs, and tight ends. Maybe I’m biased from playing fantasy football all these years, but skill position players just seem like they’d be more fun to follow. If we’re adopting a player, why not get one that handles the ball and is most responsible for scoring points?

There are three recruiting service websites I know of that rank high school football recruits: Rivals, 247Sports, and ESPN. Since we’ll be adopting our player at random, it probably doesn’t really matter which top 50 player list is used to pick our player, but an Eleven Warriors article from 2017 indicated that Rivals was the most accurate, so we’ll use their list.

As already mentioned, selecting our player to adopt will be done completely at random. There’s a number of ways this could be done, but my plan is to simply use an online random number generator to spit out a number. I’ll use random.org for this step as it’s one of the first hits in my search. Since we’ll be picking from the top 50 player prospects, I’ll generate a number between 1 and 50. If the player turns out to be a non-skill position player, I’ll generate another number, and keep repeating the process until we find our bundle of joy.

In a nutshell, that’s how Football Weblog’s Adopt-a-Player will work. I’ll announce who our inaugural 2021 player will be on July 15th, a week from this post. It’ll be interesting and quite fun to see which prospect the football stork will bring us. Stay tuned!