CECIL HURT: So what’s the secret to all these early UA commitments?

There are some things that are more appropriate in February than they are at the end of July. Snowball fights, for instance. Mailing valentines. Evaluating the recruiting classes of college football programs.

It’s still too early to give any sort of final analysis of Nick Saban’s first full class of recruits as Alabama’s head coach. (While he put his stamp on last February’s class, it wasn’t fully a Saban production.)

All the time-honored cliches about early commitments apply here. No, you don’t ever know how they are going to turn out, particularly now, when the prospects haven’t even played their final year of high school ball yet. No, verbal commitments aren’t binding. All that is true.

But this isn’t an attempt to take the University of Alabama’s sudden flurry of early commitments, amounting now to 13 or roughly half the Crimson Tide’s eventual class, and predict their ultimate impact on the football field.

This is an attempt to measure psychological impact, moreso than physical. Exactly why is Alabama -- still a team in transition -- having so much success, and not just among players who have close ties to the Crimson Tide program? Players like Tuscaloosa County’s John Michael Boswell, who lives just across from the river from the UA campus, or Tyler Love of Mountain Brook, who has numerous family ties to Alabama, are important recruits and their verbal pledges can in no way be diminished in importance.

But, promising as they are. they are not prospects that necessarily indicate a paradigm shift in the state.

But when players start to commit to Alabama from areas that offered a scant foothold for Crimson Tide recruiters for a decade or more, places like Eufaula and Prichard, it’s a sign that something else is at work.

The easy answer, of course, is Nick Saban and his staff are at work.

That’s also the correct answer, as far as it goes. But, as Saban himself has said, things don’t get done because somebody waves a magic wand. There are reasons things happen.

Saban’s past success is one reason recruits like Vigor High’s Burton Scott (who says he will go by his initials, B.J., when he plays at UA) commit early. Scott, the most recent Tide commitment, probably didn’t have Alabama among his top choices seven months ago.

It’s easy to say the hiring of Saban, who has won two SEC championships since the last time the University of Alabama won one, has allowed the Crimson Tide to overcome its “stuck-in-the-past" image. That is important, and it is an area where modernizing work continues to be required.

But that isn’t about erasing the past, just a great composer doesn’t simply discard the themes he uses in an overture. Instead, he incorporates them into the symphony and brings a harmonious resolution. That’s what Saban is doing -- seeking to harmonize Alabama’s new present with its past. Sure,

Saban sells himself and his achievements to recruits -- but he also sells the tradition, and the passion. Remember the 92,000-plus fans who showed up for A-Day? Remember the commentators who dismissed the throng as irrelevant, or worse? Well, apparently some people noticed. And some of those people were prospects.

It’s probably far too soon for any giddy reactions to Alabama’s early recruiting success. There’s more recruiting to be done, and that’s to say nothing of the small matter of a 2007 season remaining to be played. But Tide fans have waited a long time and wrestled with much frustration in waiting for a sign that the winds have changed.

The hiring of Saban was that sign, and the early recruiting results maybe, just maybe, represent the first rustling that those winds have stirred.

Cecil Hurt is sports editor of the Tuscaloosa News. Reach him at cecil.hurt@tuscaloosanews.com or 205-722-0225.