As an up-and-coming assistant coach at West Virginia nearly a decade ago, Chris Beatty thought he had a five-star prospect locked up heading into National Signing Day.
When the fax machines started humming that morning in Morgantown, and the signed national letters of intent for the Mountaineers began to roll in, Beatty waited anxiously as the one he had anticipated most didn't appear.
“I said at the end, ‘We got him, it's all good,'” Beatty, now going into his second season as the wide receivers coach at Maryland, said recently.
Turns out, they didn't have him.