National Signing (Cliche) Day

Dabo Swinney said yesterday that National Signing Day is "like Christmas for an adult," and he nailed it because there's little else that captivates grown men like the acquisition of young men who can run really fast.

The day is also big for those of us who take perverse pleasure in ridiculing the awful cliches of others. Aside from NFL Draft day, it probably doesn't get any better (or worse) than National Signing Day.

Before we take this further, full disclosure: I'm not immune from the pox of shameless cliche usage. When you type thousands of words a week and communicate with people in real time, and when you're on live radio, avoiding it is not the easiest thing in the world. So feel completely free to ridicule me anytime.

But this blog is about me ridiculing others, so let's get to it...

I'd put a fairly large wager on my belief that the top two most-uttered phrases across the nation yesterday were:

"He's a guy who..."

and,

"We filled our needs."

It was so bad that I found myself lured into the trap last night during dinner:

"Honey, this is a meal that is really good. It really filled my needs. Really hit on all 27 bites. The tofu looks like an attractive option, but I'm already full. It's a good problem to have. I'm already looking forward to the next meal, and the one after that. Because in the eating business, you're never really done."

Google News is a good search when you're looking for things that have been written as recently as a few days ago. If you want to see what people have written about, say, Sammy Watkins over the last week, you'd use Google News over a regular search and that would separate the recent articles from the old.

So let's use the trusty Google News search for "He's a guy who..."

As you can see here it produced a whopping 1,040 results of the cliche, used in about every way you can imagine.

Here's betting the first person who used "he's a guy who" was Mel Kiper Jr., back in 1987 or something.

And we move on to "We filled our needs."

Only eight results from Google News, and that's a bit shocking.

No coach is ever going to stand up on National Signing Day and say he has some questions about this class, or express some sentiment that the staff might have missed on a guy or two. Signing Day, similar to the NFL Draft, resembles the day we all fill out our NCAA Tournament brackets (or those of us who still do it): It looks so good in your mind, and everything makes such perfect sense ... and then the games begin.

This is a blog that's about to end. Hope it filled your needs.

LW