Former Clemson LB Brandon Maye: "I Feel Like...It's Easier For a Kid to Get a Scholarship"
Social media has given collegiate recruits advantages former players never had access to, making former Clemson linebacker Brandon Maye believe it's effortless to earn an offer compared to his time as a two-star prospect from Mobile, Ala., in 2006-2007.
Maye was always raised and told to put "the grind" first; prose offered to him by his mother and step-father that eventually earned him a Divison I offer at Southern Mississippi before the Tigers. Maye recollects running a 4.5-second 40-yard dash as a high school linebacker during the camp that got him this offer, speed that could have potentially earned a scholarship today from one viral video.
"We didn't get the luxury of having Hudl and all this other stuff they got going on right now with technology," Maye told AllClemson.com. "So I feel like now, it's easier for a kid to get a scholarship. It's much easier because of the exposure around social media with Instagram, Facebook, and all this different stuff.
"You go viral (once), you may end up with 50 scholarships just off of something crazy like jumping out of the pool against your body weight. Just simple stuff, man. And back then, it was just a totally different process. We had to take VHS and make our own highlight tapes."
Maye was giddy when referring to making his highlight reel on blank VHS tapes, recording them with his then high school teammate and eventual Auburn alumni Michael Mcneil in his mother's basement. Only one small portion of his personal "grind," though, Maye had the ideology of hard work put into him on the field, as well as at home.
"My mom and my stepdad have always told me to trust the process, don't rush the process," Maye said. "So, for me, what I did is I focused on the actual grind part of it: the hard work and the dedication to give myself the opportunity. So when I got the opportunity, I'd be prepared for the opportunity. That's where all my attention was at.
"Because our coaches believed in not putting as much publicity and focus on the actual scouting side of things, they wanted to focus on football. So we would ask the coaches for the tapes, and we'd take them home, and we'd copy the tapes. We would sit back, and man, it was really hard work. You'd have to rewind it, go to the time or whenever you made the play, and then have both VCRs hooked up so that you can record that play and put it on the blank tape."
Before an offer from, at the time, coach Tommy Bowden, Maye and his mother made 50+ copies of his highlight tape to send off to prospective coaches, 50 of which Maye adds, "could have easily ended up in the trash can."
After receiving an offer from Southern Mississipi, though, Maye's path to Clemson came about in what he could only describe as divine intervention.
"Coach Bowden's (now) son-in-law was playing a baseball game at the University of South Alabama; his daughter was dating this guy at the time," Maye said. "Somehow or another, my coaches knew coach Bowden, and they were telling him about their kid from Mobile who played linebacker. Bowden had three or four other linebackers ahead of me at the time that they were recruiting.
"Man, it's all God; I promise you. All three of those linebackers, within a few weeks, ended up committing to other schools. So then, it allowed me to be that fourth linebacker that they got a chance to recruit, and I moved up on their board. And when I look back at my career, and I go back and look at those guys, I think I had the best career. So everything happens for a reason. You just have to trust the process and put in all the work that it takes to get to the opportunity."
