As ESPN would be quick to remind you, today  is the day when college football recruits sign National Letters of Intent with their respective colleges and the coverage is a little overwhelming to say the least.

While rabid college football fans find any semblance of news related to their favorite team refreshing during the barren winter landscape of college basketball and the NBA, national signing day doesn’t really do it for me.

As much as I love me some NFL draft, it’s a widely speculative event. There is no science to it and seemingly no reason to why a first-round pick is a terrible NFL player and a sixth-round pick from Michigan is arguably the greatest quarterback of a generation. But national signing day is worse than speculation. Maybe it’s because I went to a basketball school who never landed any of the big recruits that some of these programs get annually but I’ve never been excited about an 18-year-old kid signing with my team after seeing him destroy inferior talent.

While I am largely indifferent to this day and believe it’s significantly overvalued as a day on the popular sports calendar, I am interested to see where quarterback Terrelle Pryor chooses to go to school. Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez has been recruiting the Pittsburgh native hard and has pretty much staked his offense on landing Pryor after Ryan Mallett (a big recruit from the ‘07 class) saw the writing on the wall and transfered to Arkansas. If Rodriguez doesn’t sign Pryor, he may be between a rock and a hard place when spring practice starts.

That being said, what impact will these kids really have? Think back to last season and you can probably count on one hand the number of true freshmen that impacted their team in any significant way. Joe McKnight from USC was a nice addition to their backfield but hardly a feature back, Noel Devine at West Virginia but only saw a lot of time when Steve Slaton was hurt, Arrelious Benn proved to be as good as advertised at Illinois and Michael Crabtree from Texas Tech was the nation’s best receiver last year. So that’s five kids out of the hundreds that will sign letters today.

Still excited?

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