A Football Scout Who Does His Prep Work

During registration for the event in San Antonio, players lined up to meet Lichtenfels. He interviewed about 90 players and took a head shot of each one, so he could update their Scout profile. Late in the afternoon, Lichtenfels introduced himself to a Dunbar High School junior named Reggie Ellis.

"You gotta make me big time," Ellis said.

"Oh yeah?" Lichtenfels said. "Why?"

"Y'all are gonna make me or break me," Ellis said. "I need five stars."

"I can't just give those away," Lichtenfels said. "They mean something."

College coaches admit they closely monitor Web sites like Scout.com and Rivals.com for recruiting information, because they hardly have a choice. Because recruiting analysts are immune to NCAA contact rules, they often know more about high school players than the college coaches who recruit them. "I can't necessarily call a kid and ask how he feels about playing for us," said Illinois offensive coordinator Mike Locksley. "But I can look on the Internet and probably find out what I wanted anyway."

To provide that body of information, Lichtenfels obsesses over his evaluations and news stories. When introducing himself, Lichtenfels sometimes jokes that he works for Scout -- and tries to piece together a life on the side.

A few days after he returned to Robinson from San Antonio, Lichtenfels woke up at 10:30 a.m., dressed in windbreaker pants and a San Diego Chargers T-shirt. He walked down a creaky flight of wooden stairs and stopped in the kitchen to grab a Red Bull energy drink and a can of chewing tobacco. He passed through the living room, hugged his two young sons and entered the home office he refers to as "the cockpit."

When Lichtenfels started full time at Scout, he remodeled his enclosed porch into a cramped work space. The room is about 12 feet wide and four feet deep. A dusty treadmill takes up almost half of that space. Thousands of DVDs featuring highlights of high school players spill out of two moving boxes and three, 35-galloon blue jugs. Cracked cases and loose DVDs cover sections of the carpeted floor, confining Lichtenfels to a small chair wedged between a computer and a 12-inch Sharp television. He usually sits there for about 14 hours each day.

Lichtenfels likes to start work in the late morning and continue until a few hours before sunrise, a habit he developed at the steel mill. He divides his long days into phases, a mental trick to make his work more manageable. Three hours calling high school coaches for tips and information. Three hours calling high school players. Four hours watching and analyzing highlight videos. Two hours to monitor breaking news on Internet message boards. Two hours to write a handful of daily stories for Scout's Web sites.

Like most Internet recruiting analysts, Lichtenfels carries the stresses of two jobs within one: As a journalist, he hopes to break all news stories about college commitments in the East and Midwest. As an analyst, he needs to evaluate and rank as many as 10,000 players. To fulfill both of those roles on signing day of last year, Lichtenfels wrote 14 stories for Scout and gave interviews to 12 radio stations and 43 newspapers.

Lichtenfels prides himself on building firm relationships with players. He travels to evaluate prospects at 25 football camps and combines each year and, once there, he often coaches the lineman. The first time he calls each teenager, he asks to speak with a parent to introduce himself. He communicates with prospects late at night through instant messages and myspace.com, trading suggestions about rap music. Marvin Austin, a defensive lineman from Ballou High School, called Lichtenfels early on Christmas morning to wish him a happy holiday.