Ladwig Bloomer Wisconsin

Recruiting Notebook

But he could not walk away from $ 5 million, and Texas found itself having to do with the group because of the nation's first incoming pitchers, but no big bat.

"My father always told me:" Do not think about what could have been, "said Harmon a month and a half later. "All of a sudden I find out about eight minutes until midnight that Bell's going to sign. I didn't think he was going to sign. My wife saw me up late and said, 'What's wrong with you? I've never seen you act like this before.' That was the weirdest day ever."

One way to remove some of the angst from signing deadline day is to recruit players willing to bypass the draft altogether. It's not a coincidence that the top two schools in Baseball America's annual recruiting class rankings each landed a marquee talent from the class of 2012 who enrolled early.

As it turned out, Texas landed a blue-chip position player after all. Switch-hitting shortstop C.J. Hinojosa of Klein Collins High in Spring, Texas, is in the process of finishing his high school coursework this fall so he can enroll at UT this winter and play for the Longhorns in the spring.

And Vanderbilt scored a major coup when powerful catcher Chris Harvey of Pennsylvania's Germantown Academy enrolled at Vandy this fall, a full year early. Harvey joins unsigned first-round pick Tyler Beede and fellow Northeasterners Adam Ravenelle and John Norwood in the nation's No. 1 recruiting class.

Early enrollment has become more common in recent years, and there have been some very notable success stories. UCLA's Trevor Bauer, North Carolina's Levi Michael and of course CC of Southern Nevada's Bryce Harper all started their college careers a year (or two years, in Harper's case) early and left school as first-round picks. It takes rare physical and mental maturity to thrive as those players did on and off the field.

Wisconsin, A History

Wisconsin

Wisconsin

Wisconsin death trip

Stalag Wisconsin, inside WW II prisoner-of-war camps