In the dark ages of college football recruiting, before players could upload their highlight videos to YouTube and high school coaches could pass along full games to college assistants with a simple Hudl link, moms, dads and coaches hunched over VCRs—we’ll pause here for those under 25 to Google what that acronym means—and created tapes that they would then mail to college football offices with the hope that someone on a faraway campus might watch. Sometimes those coaches watched those videos. Sometimes they didn’t.
Such a videotape of a senior quarterback from Junipero Serra High in San Mateo, Calif.