Former Florida State, NFL standout Ernie Sims reflects on recruitment

The top-rated prospect in the 2003 recruiting class still has all his recruiting letters shoved in a shoebox under a bed at his mother’s house. It’s still something that is important to him, something he still values.

“When I started getting letters, I’d say like eighth or ninth grade,” said Sims, who helped coach linebackers at the Under Armour Future 50 this week.

“I still have all the letters in a shoebox under the bed in my mom’s house. They came from every university you could think of.”

Many were mailed from Florida State, where he ended up playing, although there was so much chatter that Georgia was inching in late in his recruitment.

But as Sims tells it, Auburn was the biggest threat to the Seminoles – not the Bulldogs - and it came down to the waning moments before National Signing Day to determine whether the Tallahassee (Fla.) North Florida Christian would stay home or head to the SEC.

“There were all types of rumors,” Sims said. “Truth be told, I was more close to Auburn than anything. All of them were elite. Georgia, I’m a big outdoorsman and I like their veterinary school. Coach (Mark) Richt is a man of faith so he definitely played a role in that.

“For me it came down to Florida State and Auburn. Coach (Eddie) Gran, the running backs coach at the time at Auburn, was really genuine to me and I really enjoyed spending time with him.

“It was a lot of things that it came down to – staying close to home, my childhood dream playing for Bobby Bowden, one of my best friends who’s like a brother to me, Antonio Cromartie, saying he was going to go. It literally came down to the night before that I made the decision to go to Florida State.”

Just a decade ago, the recruiting media landscape was completely different. Rarely was Sims swamped with phone calls. Text messages? Twitter direct messages? No way.

“Back then it was one of the most heavily covered recruitments at Rivals,” National Recruiting Director Mike Farrell said. “There was a lot of intrigue and some late visits. He took it right down to the wire.

“Everybody thought he was going to go to Florida State, but he made it pretty dramatic with the visits he took.”

For the five-star linebacker to read about himself, he went to Rivals or flipped through a magazine. Sure, Sims was on the cover and that was a big deal, but the deluge of information available today on top recruits did not exist then. Social media and its impact on recruiting coverage was still years off.

“Back then, all I remember is Rivals.com and we were in the magazine,” Sims said. “They had the NIKE SPARQ camps and we had the Cali-Florida game. I remember they had Maurice Jones-Drew and we couldn’t stop that guy for anything. At that time I was playing running back.

“The landscape has changed so much and this is my first time experiencing what Under Armour is doing, and it’s just amazing to see just the exposure and the amount of engagement these kids are getting as opposed to when I was coming out. We just got a magazine. I got the front page of a magazine. I got the No. 1 spot on the Web site and that was pretty much it.”

It was more than a decade ago that Farrell covered Sims, but how can anyone forget how the five-star played?

Sims was fierce, tough, undersized but a big hitter who knocked the snot out of people. That’s why he was successful at Florida State. That’s why he had more than 600 tackles in the NFL.

That’s why Rivals.com rated him No. 1 in the 2003 class ahead of Reggie Bush, who also backed up his ranking at USC and then in the NFL.

“He played running back and linebacker and he played great at both,” Farrell said. “He was a tackling machine on defense. Nowadays, he would be one of those guys where we wouldn’t rank him a five-star because he’s 6-foot. Physically dominant, always arrived at the ball with a thump and as a running back he was hard to tackle.

“Nice kid, too, very quiet. His dad took care of most of the recruitment. It was hard to get Ernie on the phone.”

Some things in recruiting never change.