Got a chance to talk to Davis High mega-recruit Troy Hinds tonight, about nine hours after the 6-foot-5, 230-pound defensive end committed to BYU football coach Bronco Mendenhall.
Hinds' description of the last 24 hours: "Pretty crazy."
And a big relief off his shoulders, he said.
Hinds said that although he committed to Mendenhall today, he pretty much made up his mind over the course of the last two weeks.
"When I knew 100 percent that's where I wanted to go, that's when I [pulled the trigger]," he said.
Hinds said all 16 or so schools that had offered him had their strong points here or there, but in his mind BYU had all of them.
"It's not one thing that I can pinpoint," he said. "It was a combination of things like my relationships with the coaches, the environment down there, things like that."
Hinds said he turns 19 next May, and will likely have his mission call before he even graduates from high school. His mission plans weren't a big factor in his decision, he said, noting that every coach at every school he talked to was OK with him leaving right away on a mission.
Nor was a school's conference affiliation.
He said the fact that all the other schools (except Notre Dame) that offered him are in BCS conferences did not have an impact on his decision.
"It's the school, not who the school plays [that is important to him]," he said."I didn't take into account what conference they are in when I weighed [the pros and cons] of each school. That didn't matter that much."
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It was interesting to hear some of the chatter at BYU practice tonight regarding the misconceptions of how the Hinds' commitment news broke. Sounds like some BYU fans out there believe that I ignored some sort of embargo on the press release that Hinds wrote when I first mentioned on Twitter (@drewjay) that he had committed to BYU and jumped the gun, thereby purposefully stealing the kid's thunder.
That's not true.
Here's how it went down, in case you care:
Knowing that they were going to meet with Mendenhall around noon on Monday and give the commitment, the Hinds apparently wrote the press release/letter on Sunday night and emailed it to dozens and dozens of coaches from around the country who had recruited Hinds.
They wanted those coaches to get the news before they read it from an online news source.
The plan was to send it to the media after the meeting with Mendenhall, or minutes before.
The leak, if you want to call it that -- or the way the plan got scuttled -- came when one of the recipients who got the email late Sunday or early Monday forwarded it on to me. Far as I can tell, no other media member got the forwarded email until later in the day, after the beans were spilled.
I read it around 8:30 a.m., saw the part where Hinds mentioned he was meeting with Mendenhall this morning, and figured that the meeting had already taken place. So I tweeted it out, then quickly filed a report for the Tribune website, and another on this blog.
So there you have it.
