I have news for you Wolverines fans, you are likely getting the best prospect regardless of position in the 2008 recruiting class. I don't care what Rivals.com or any other analyst out there says, there is nobody in the 2008 that is blessed with the athletic ability and football talent of Sam McGuffie. McGuffie was somehow left off the previous Rivals100, Rivals.com list of the top 100 prospects for the 2008 recruiting class. There could be no bigger mistake by the staff at Rivals.com...those folks do tremendous work there and have an excellent database of prospects, which I'm constantly viewing, but leaving Sam McGuffie off the Rivals100 list was one of the biggest mistakes I've ever seen. This kid is no secret, his highlights are plastered all over YouTube. Check out his highlights below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4IJ17ODo_s
Honestly, even Hellen Keller could see that McGuffie is one of the top 10 prospects in the country, forget about the top 100!
They recently updated their list and have McGuffie listed at four-stars and as the 90th best prospect in the nation. If I was making the list, McGuffie would be rated as five stars and ranked as the top player in the class of 2008, simply because of his freakish athletic ability and his mind-boggling statistics. I think the only reason Rivals.com didn't rate him higher is because of his size. That is their opinion and they are entitled to it. Evaluations and rankings of prospects are pretty hard, because evaluations differ so drastically from person-to-person, but I find it hard to believe they couldn't find a 5-star rating for Sam McGuffie. You simply will not find another running back on this planet with his superhuman skill set.
McGuffie will make an instant impact of Michigan in the fall of 2008, because Chad Henne and Mike Hart will be graduating after the 2007-2008 football season and the Ryan Mallett and Sam McGuffie era will officially begin in Ann Arbor.
Why do I say McGuffie is an Internet legend? Well one video of his Rivals.com highlights has over 55,000 views!! That's unreal folks. Even more unreal is the fact that "The Play" as it is now deemed by some analysts, where McGuffie leaps directly over an opposing defensive back in the open field is on YouTube and has been viewed an eye-popping 567,205 times! The kid has already reached rock star status and he hasn't even begun his senior season at Cy-Fair. His highlights labeled as the McGuffie Mixtape on YouTube have been viewed 463,269 times!
That tells you one, how amazing of a talent this kid is, and two, how popular that glorious game of pigskin is in America. McGuffie is the best white running back I've ever seen and is a white version of Reggie Bush. McGuffie's athletic measurables are off-the-charts. He's listed at 6'0, 188 lbs. runs a 4.32 40 yard dash and has a 41 inch vertical leap. Blessed with an amazing amount of acceleration, "Sam I am" McGuffie, can turn on the jets, blast his way through the hole with ease and coast to the end zone. This kid slices his way through opposing defenses like a hot knife slices through butter. When he's not breaking tackles in the open field, McGuffie can also be seen breaking defenders akles with his jaw-dropping agility. His tremendous change of direction reminds me very much of Reggie Bush. This kid can stop on a dime without hesitation. He is also blessed with Reggie Bush's leaping ability and you will often see him leaping over defenders in his highlights. The Cy-Fair standout is also blessed with an amazingly soft pair of hands, racking up 400 receiving yards last season as a junior.
Last season, he gashed opposing defenses for a hair-raising 3,121 yards on the ground and 43 touchdowns. The numbers are so good they almost aren't believable, that is, until you watch his highlights. He averaged 8.7 yards per carry on the ground last season and even had 400 receiving yards. I'm convinced this kid was a cyborg sent from outerspace to carry the pigskin. He can do no wrong. It's a bird, it's a plane, no wait, ladies and gentlemen, it's Sam McGuffie!
In all my years of following high school football, I've never seen a SPARQ rating like this kid. He has the highest SPARQ rating I've ever seen. When I saw he scored a 104.85 on the SPARQ test, I simply could not believe my eyes. Three words: freak of nature!
To give you an idea of how good McGuffie's SPARQ rating truly is, let's take a look at the numbers of running back Covaughn DeBoskie, another member of the 2008 recruiting class. Like McGuffie, DeBoskie is an all-purpose back with remarkable hands and speed in the open field. He is a very highly rated tailback as well, earning 4-stars from Rivals.com heading into his senior season for Hamilton High School in Chandler, Arizona. DeBoskie's measurables are: he's (6'0, 186 lbs.), runs a 4.48 forty yard dash, runs a 4.46 in the shuttle, put up 11 bench press reps, and his vertical leap is 37 inches. This kid is certainly no slouch, as his numbers indicate. His SPARQ rating was 78.27. McGuffie's rating was nearly 27 points higher than that! Ladies and gentlemen we might want to give the government a call, because Sam McGuffie might just be an alien sent from outerspace to carry the pigskin!
For many of you out there that do not know what SPARQ is. It is a combine-testing system that crunches a bunch of numbers and basically determines how good of an athlete a football player is from four categories: forty time, bench press repititions, shuttle, and vertical leap. There is a link on the SPARQ website at:
http://sparqtraining.com/ratings/sparqulator2/test_results.p hp that will take you to a Sparqulator if you wish to calculate your own SPARQ rating.
Sam McGuffie's legendary status will only continue to grow this season as he continues to leap defenders in the open field with tremendous ease. By the time he arrives in Ann Arbor, the fans there will likely already have him penciled in as the Heisman front-runner for 2008.
