The first individual to receive extensive publicity for his recruiting service was Joe Terranova, a Notre Dame grad during the Joe Kuharich days who became an executive with Ford Motor Company in Detroit. During his student days at Notre Dame, it always bothered Joe that Notre Dame would finish 2-8 in 1960 - or 5-5 in 1961 and 1962 or 2-7 in 1963 - with so many players who became outstanding pros such as Daryle Lamonica, Nick Buoniconti, Myron Pottios, Monty Stickles, Joe Carollo, etc.
Joe Terranova is the "godfather" of recruiting services.
So, Joe took up following college recruiting as a hobby and eventually made it a cottage industry for himself on the side in the 1970s. In 1978 (or maybe it was 1977), Sports Illustrated began using his recruiting rankings in its "Scorecard" section every year, and Joe would always do it with humor. For example, he referred to 1980 Irish recruit Tim Marshall as "Darth Vader in cleats." Or, he would write a story of how he'd watch film with Gerry Faust and say, "Coach, this kid doesn't know the meaning of the word fear!" Then, he'd write that Faust would retort, "I've seen his transcript - and there are a lot of words he doesn't know the meaning of."
Terranova's popularity inspired Chicago's Tom Lemming, who was working as a mailman, to begin his own recruiting service sometime around 1979 or 1980. Through hard work and developing contacts, Lemming's popularity grew tremendously in the 1980s, and others from various parts of the country - Allen Wallace (SuperPrep in California), Max Emfinger (Texas), Phil Grosz (Pennsylvania), Bill Buchalter (Florida), etc. - soon followed suit. Their newsletters expanded into 900 numbers in the 1980s and 1990s, and fax services, too. All did their own form of rating players, with top 100s being the most popular. Emfinger devised his own system of chips - green, red, blue, with a gold-chip being the highest.
With the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s, recruiting services became the new rage by the turn of the century.
