After St. Joseph's Prep football coach Gil Brooks found out earlier this year that one of his players - a kid just finishing his freshman year in high school - already had an offer to play college football at Stanford, the coach said he "tried to be a wet blanket."

Brooks wasn't at all sure that Skyler Mornhinweg was going to be the Prep's starting quarterback as a sophomore. Stanford already wanted him?

"I probably tried to talk him out of committing," Brooks said.

Last June, Mornhinweg, the son of Eagles offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg, orally committed to Stanford, although the decision isn't binding until a letter of intent is signed in February of his senior year.

Skyler Mornhinweg had started at safety for the Prep as a freshman and won this season's starting-quarterback job in August workouts. He has had an impressive sophomore season and will be center stage tonight in the Catholic League Class AAAA title game against La Salle High School.

"To me they seem prescient," Brooks said earlier this season of Stanford's decision to offer Mornhinweg a scholarship. "The kid's a rare talent."

A player committing to a college so early isn't the norm - not yet anyway - but experts across the landscape agree that football's recruiting calendar has moved up in recent years. The pressure put on high school players by college coaches also has continually increased, while the value of oral commitments has gone way down.

Sometimes, an oral commitment marks the beginning of recruiting wars. Other colleges get that news and start recruiting that player.

Also, the recruiting venues have changed. Summer camps and clinics, quasi-combines, have risen in importance despite their questionable link to game performance.

"I've seen that landscape change," said Villanova coach Andy Talley, who often competes with Division I-A schools in building a team capable of winning the I-AA national title. "The early commitments are all based on these individual camps. . . . In some ways, I think it's hurt football teams. They've gotten commitments from kids at the end of [their] junior year who turned out to be not what they thought. They didn't have a senior year to complete the study.

"I think that's why there's a lot of parity. They turn out not to be the very best players. A school like Boise State ends up taking a lot of kids that the Pac-10 missed on. A lot of schools in the East, it's come back to hurt them."

Tom Luginbill, ESPN's college football recruiting expert, said Talley was right.

"That's how a Boise State can beat an Oklahoma without a single kid that Oklahoma even offered," Luginbill said.

Luginbill didn't want to talk about a specific school, but he mentioned how a Big Twelve school - not Oklahoma - that was trying to improve itself earlier in this decade under two different head coaches would "go out and offer 200 guys before they'd even made a total decision on whether they wanted the kid."

Luginbill also said, "Don't kid yourself. These Internet sites that are promoting every single thing that a kid does at a camp or a combine like it's never been done before is a big part of this process. . . . You watch, it's like clockwork. There will be somebody out there who has a two-star listing. He will get a BCS offer. I promise you, he will be a three-star within 24 hours, if not a four-star.

"And the minute [college coaches] hear somebody else has committed, you're obligated to see if that guy's a player, to do your due diligence."

It's become common practice, Luginbill said, for college coaches to offer six players scholarships for a specific position and tell them that the first four to accept will get the scholarship.

"That creates a little bit of a leverage," Luginbill said.

It also leads to players committing without really committing. Other options can remain in play.

"I think the decisions like that are the ones that often lead to a decommitment," Luginbill said.