Biggest College Recruitment Flops

The biggest college recruitment flops were once the most sought-after high school athletes. They were courted by colleges across the country, offered scholarships and given the royal treatment by coaches, recruiters and others all with the hopes that they'd turn out to be the next big thing in college sports. Spoiler: These athletes did nothing of the sort and ended up disappointing many in the end.

Some of the most memorable college recruiting flops came from the highly competitive world of NCAA Football. While these recruiting disasters come from every position on the field, it's perhaps easiest to point the finger at quarterbacks who don't perform as expected. Ryan Perrilloux, Rhett Bomar, Mitch Mustain, Kodi Burns, Xavier Lee and Jonathan Crompton are just a few of the young quarterbacks in recent memory that were so highly regarded before they began their college football careers but failed to live up to that promise once they were in the game.

College recruitment busts are far from limited to just quarterbacks or even NCAA Football as there are certainly many that come to mind in the world of college basketball as well. Dennis Latimore, Isaiah Fox, Mustafa Shakur and Chris Rodgers are some of the most notorious in recent years as they were once considered the top NCAA Basketball prospects in the country but went on to have little or no impact to their various teams.

Often times, it's not the fault of the players or even the coaching staff for this disappointment. Life happens and people are forced to make tough decisions, with some of those decisions meaning giving up a dream of becoming a star athlete is the best choice. In even other situations an aspiring and talented player is sidelined with an injury and never returns to that top form.

For whatever reason these players didn't work out and that's a shame. It's definitely hard to predict the future and in these cases that is easy to prove. It sucks to be on either side of that conundrum but there is a bright side to all of this. For each of these recruitment flops, a door was opened up for another player to step into that spotlight and shine. For that I'm sure those replacement players are thankful.