While Wednesday, Feb. 3 might not be notated as a holiday on your desk calendar, college football fans around the nation know better.

That’s because Wednesday is the day most every college football fan waits for once the season ends.

That’s right, it’s national signing day, the first day in which high school football players across the country can sign a letter of intent to attend the college of their choice.

While recruiting has always been important for colleges to restock talent, the last few years have turned recruiting into quite a big business.

There are Web sites and magazines that are dedicated to recruiting news and rankings.

Scout.com and Rivals.com are two of the major sites, and they have developed a huge following and made lots of money in the recruiting business.

And it didn’t take long before ESPN jumped in.

The sports network also started ranking players, has hosted several high school all-star games, and will have nine hours — NINE HOURS! — of recruiting coverage on Wednesday across its many different channels.

You can watch in wonder as high school students pick a hat off a table with a school logo on it and put it on their head, announcing their school of choice.

At the center of this huge business are 16-18-year-old youth.

It used to be that these teens were inundated with letters from colleges and phone calls and visits from coaches who promise many things, some legal, some not so legal.

While the letters and visits and promises still come, so too do people who do rankings for the Web sites, “reporters” for recruiting Web sites and fan sites who call recruits every other day asking which school they are going to attend or who their leader is, and crazy fans who try to buddy up to players in an effort to convince them to come play for their school.

So what do the recruits think about all of this? I’d imagine they love it.

They get treated like kings, and are gladhanded by anybody and everybody they meet.

When they take campus visits, they are wined and dined by coaches and alumni.

They get taken out by very attractive female guides, who are students employed by the athletic department to show the recruit a good time (wink, wink).

So considering that, is it really all that surprising that several Tennessee players were kicked off the team after being charged with armed robbery last season?

Or is it news that numerous Ole Miss players stole things out of their hotel room a few years ago?

Or is it shocking that two Mississippi State players were kicked off the team for firing a gun at a car on campus?

I’m not surprised, are you?

A portion of the popular, non-fiction book “Friday Night Lights” by H.G. Bissinger took a real life look at what recruiting can do for a high school athlete.

Two highly recruited players from Carter High School in Dallas were arrested for armed robbery soon after signing to play football at major universities.

The players weren’t in need of money but committed the robberies simply for kicks, feeling that they could get away with anything because they were so revered by everyone.

The judge wasn’t so sympathetic, and sentenced one to 16 years and the other to 20 years in prison.

Marshall Gandy, the prosecutor on the case, could only come to one viable explanation why two teens from middle class families would choose to rob video stores and gas stations seemingly for fun.

“You look at how we treat them in high school, and how we treat them in college, and everyone asks why they act like children,” Gandy said. “How would you expect them to act any other way?”