Does the device that makes the phone ring ever just quit? Does it ever beat itself into replacement?

This possibility presented itself Wednesday in NIU head football coach Jerry Pettibone’s office, sometime after the umpteenth call came through at mid-morning. It’s the first day the nation’s high school football elite can make final their living arrangements for the next four to five years.

Pettibone, he of national recruiting fame, has been in since around seven o’clock reading the Chicago Tribune and waiting for the first of his six eight o’clock signees to call.

When the call came, the new Huskie, Sean Allgood, a wishbone quarterback from Ashtabula, Ohio is on the phone instead of Pettibone’s assistant, Russ Graham. “Where’s Coach Graham?” Allgood asks. Pettibone smiled. “Sean, don’t fool around. This is serious business.” That’s one in the fold.

Pettibone’s assistants are scattered throughout the Midwest this day, the culmination of a process begun last March. That’s when prospect cards are sent to high school coaches in Northern’s recruiting domain—Northern Indiana, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota’s Twin Cities area.

In April, the cards are returned and analyzed, and in May coaches are sent to their annual region to do preliminary checking. After this May, visits will be limited to two weeks instead of the present month-long socializing.

Upon returning, “junior lists” are created, including all players the coaches deem valuable—initially there are around 500 on the mailing lists. These prospects are divided into “blues,” “reds” and “yellows,” “blues” being the best and “yellows”—those needing work. On Pettibone’s plastic play-drawing board Wednesday there are more than 30 tags with a player’s name, school, height, weight and academic standing. These are the finalists. These are all “blues.”

After May, the coaches cannot visit schools again until Nov. 1 and cannot contact players until a month later. They can and do send lots of literature.

Written on Pettibone’s board, Recruit Central, if you like, are the 16 players who will sign this first day. They are listed under the coach who will sign them and the time they will sign. Pettibone waits.

*8:23 a.m.—As if from a prepared speech, but no less heartfelt for all its use, Pettibone recites the second of many greetings, this time to Kevin Slosarek, a halfback from New London, Wisc.

“Are ya all signed up? Well, that’s great. I wanna congratulate you and tell you how excited we are to have you at Northern. Now it’s all over with and you can settle down and enjoy the rest of your senior year. It’s the beginning of five exciting years for you.”

Pettibone and his staff know the 16 scrawled in green ink will sign with NIU. This is not NFL draft day, when deals are made as the selection clock ticks.

“If something was gonna happen, it would’ve happened by now,” he says. Two weeks prior to signing day—when the schoolboys bring together the thoughts that have been charmed in different directions for a year—that’s when nerves split, Pettibone says. Some kids do procrastinate, though.

In his Oklahoma days, Pettibone and others were in pursuit of one Rayford Clark, a talent from tiny Hugo, Okla. The day before signing day, Clark was still being wooed by Pettibone and two other Big Eight Conference schools. When Pettibone and Clark’s high school coach, L.D. Baines—”I’ll never forget the name,” Pettibone says—spotted Clark in a rival coach’s car, they gave chase. After screaming around a few corners, Pettibone reevaluated his job on the spot.

“I said ‘L.D., slow down. This 17-year old is not worth our lives’ and I let him go. He signed with SMU the next morning.”

*8:38 a.m.—Richards High School running back Arthur Russell, one of the top 75 players in Chicagoland, signs. He has had problems meeting grade requirements but assistant coach Jay Schaake stuck with him, working with Russell’s counselors while Big Ten and Big Eight coaches backed off.

“It means an awful lot to coach Schaake and me for you to trust us,” Pettibone says to Russell’s mother. Then to Schaake, “I’m glad you got that big blue chipper in the stable there.”

Often overlooked is a university’s “recruiting” of the parents and high school coaches. Pettibone, named the country’s top recruiter in 1984 by Sports Illustrated and recruiter of 20 All-Americas, two Heisman winners, two Outland Trophy players and one Lombardi Trophy winner, says the coaches on the road build relationships with families and players while the head coach sells the program’s philosophy and is the “common denominator in the evaluating process.” Pettibone sees all the players while the assistants take care of their area.

igh school coaches, fathers-away-from-home for their players’ four years, need to “feel good that you’re a person of integrity,” Pettibone says, though sometimes good intentions aren’t enough.

While courting Darrell Ray, an eventual All-America defensive back with Oklahoma and later a New York Jet, Pettibone was told to take a hike by Ray’s high school coach, a University of Texas alum. Pettibone never showed at the school again but recruited over the phone and at Ray’s home.

“He (Ray’s coach) was so strong for them (Texas) that he hurt them. His parents asked why I never visited the school. When I told them they said ‘That’s not right, him making that decision.'”

Pettibone’s wife Susy shows up with doughnuts and Valentine’s Day cookies that are best measured in inches and pounds. The football secretary won’t be in so Susy will handle calls along with volunteer offensive coach Tom Lewinski, who is also assistant on-campus recruiting coordinator. Lewinski, who looks young and in shape enough to be coached, grabs a doughnut.

“This is a family thing,” Pettibone says to a caller. “We’re all gonna be fat with all the sweets coming up here.”

*8:50 a.m.—Corey Chattick, a halfback from Sterling, Ill. is signed.

*9:04 a.m.—Bobby Stevens, a quarterback from De Lasalle H.S. in New Orleans calls. He and a classmate, McArthur Griffin, a cornerback who will sign later that night, will be Huskies in the fall. The Huskies heard of these two from a prep coach at the Valley Forge Military Academy in Virginia. His quarterback (from Louisiana) told the coach about Stevens, the coach called assistant coach Robert Jackson, Jackson got film and discovered Griffin as well.

Pettibone knows well that recruiters who stick to top 100 prospect lists are missing the whole picture. Current Huskie QB Stacy Robinson, sixth in the nation in rushing and first in rushing QBs, was recruited by just two schools, NIU and Western Michigan.

*9:06 a.m.—Robert McDonald, a St. Louis quarterback, signs.

*9:16 a.m.—Darvell Ecford, an all-state linebacker from Milwaukee, signs but is back to class before his new head coach can talk to him. “Is he feeling good?” Pettibone asks his man, Mike Summers, in Milwaukee. Ecford visited NIU with his high school coach because Ecford’s mother has no car.

While Pettibone’s assistants have one or two names each to sign, Gary Evans has four under his name and two who will be signed by another coach. “He’s the coach on our staff that has done the best job this year,” says Pettibone.

As hard as recruiters work and as much as they travel, players will be lost to other schools. Pettibone says this year’s one-that-got-away (to Indiana) is Byron High School’s Troy Drake, a loss made all the more grating because Drake is a defensive lineman, a position Pettibone is unsure of after the graduation of Rodney Akis, Ted Hennings and Phil Bucaro.

Even worse, Drake is from Huskie running back Adam Dach’s alma mater. “Right up the road here, thirty minutes away,” says a teeth-grinding Pettibone. “We worked hard on him.”

A happier-ending came out of downstate Bloomington. Linebacker Jason Keene, another top 75 gridder sought by Wisconsin and Missouri, committed to Northern this winter despite being the son of a former Mizzou Tiger. Part of the attraction was NIU’s business school, Pettibone says.

*9:29 a.m.—Reed Schreck from the Rockford Register Star calls, asks questions, listens, says goodbye.

*10:03 a.m.—Assistant Coach Mike Sabeck’s wife brings fudge brownies which harden arteries at a glance. The brownies are a letter-of-intent day tradition, she says. She tells her young son to “congratulate Coach Pettibone on his recruiting.” The boy puts a finger to his mouth, counts the words he knows, and says “Caba.”

Lewinski has now had three doughnuts by 10 a.m. “I’m not gonna run today. I’m gonna let this settle into fat,” he says.

*10:35 a.m.—After a 10:24 signing—Elroy Glover, a halfback from Chicago’s Englewood High—Pettibone sets up a film of a potential Huskie receiver from Texas. “This is the best high school football there is,” the 50-year old Texan boasts. In a stadium most colleges would sell beer ads for, the teams fumble a lot and the center of Pettibone’s attention catches one pass in the first half. “He looks real good in his uniform,” Pettibone says.

*10:50 a.m.—”The first glitch,” Pettibone calls it. Summers’ Milwaukee-to-Bloomington, Ill. flight is cancelled due to ice. There is talk of a mock signing for the press, who have gathered around Keene at Bloomington High School. Summers will do the “real” signing whenever he arrives.

“It’s just like the U.S. Mail,” Pettibone laughs. “It will not stop a Huskie coach from getting his man. Rain, sleet or snow.”

“Mike Summers is probably on a horse right now,” Lewinski says.

*10:55 a.m.—Pettibone on the phone. Keene’s high school coach will keep postponing the press conference until Summers arrives. Susy remembers when her husband was calling in from all points—”You could get guys from all over the country at Oklahoma,” Pettibone says—instead of being called.

“I was used to him being gone all the time,” says Susy, who has been Mrs. Pettibone for 11 years. “It’s nice to finally get to know him.”

“That’s one of the pluses about being at Northern. You don’t have to go too far to recruit, you can be home at night,” says the domestic Pettibone. “I don’t miss the on-the-road, I miss the building of the (family-player) relationship.”

Pettibone, never a high school coach, says though he absorbed all he could from men he has played for and worked under— Bud Wilkinson, Chuck Fairbanks, Barry Switzer, Hayden Fry and Tom Osborne, a College Football Hall of Fame Who’s Who—the most important lesson came from the least known of these coaches. Jim McKenzie, head coach at Oklahoma who died just a year after giving Pettibone his start as a freshman coach in 1966, taught Pettibone to be more than an amalgam of others’ traits.

“You can’t be somebody else,” Pettibone says. “You can put together a philosophy derived from other people, but you’ve got to be yourself.”

*11:03 a.m. _Halfback Tom McKinney, another of the six Wisconsin lads Pettibone brings in, is now a Huskie.

*11:15 a.m.—Rich Strom from the Tribune calls, asks questions, listens, says goodbye.

*11:20 a.m.—Bryan Preiss, a linebacker from Germantown, Wisc. will soon have a cardinal and black wardrobe.

Another one in the fold.