National Signing Day is just around the corner. High school players are coming down the final stretch of their recruiting process, and memories are about to be made. This time of year also has former college players recalling their recruiting memories. If Randy Moss could go through his recruiting process all over again, he believes he would still make the decision to attend Notre Dame.
“If I could do it over again, Notre Dame would’ve probably still been there,” Moss said in an interview with Aaron Torres of FOXSports.com. “It’s an experience I’ll never forget. That was my team.”
Of course, Notre Dame was never truly his team. During his senior season in high school Moss was involved in a racially charged fight that led to an arrest and charges as an adult and a felony. He would go on to plead guilty to two counts of battery. With that, Notre Dame pulled their offer from Moss despite the plea of support to administration by head coach Lou Holtz. He wound up at Florida State where Bobby Bowden had agreed to bring him in to the program if he sat out a season. Moss did just that and impressed in practice when given a chance, but in 1996 he was removed from the Florida State program after showing up to serve his jail sentence for the earlier battery charges and testing positive for marijuana.
It would take some time before any football program would go near Moss again, but eventually Marshall, at the time a 1AA program, came with an offer for the former West Virginia high school star to restore his image close to home. The fresh start served Moss well, as he went on to be a Heisman finalist and a first round NFL Draft pick.