Tales from the road

ByJEREMY CRABTREE
January 27, 2014, 3:07 PM

— -- With national signing day little more than a week away, coaches are crisscrossing the country to lock down key commitments. It's during this time -- at in-home visits -- that anything can happen. While making last-minute pitches to recruits and their families, coaches will do almost anything to secure a signature. Whether that means choking down some bad food or doing whatever it takes to meet a recruit, coaches have great stories from this time of year. Here are some of those stories:

A coach. A coach and his car. And locking the keys inside.

"I remember going on the road with Coach [Fred] Goldsmith to recruit Brendon Fitzgerald out of Dallas when I was at Rice. I meet up with Coach Goldsmith at a filling station in Dallas near the airport. I'm filling up the car, Coach jumps in the car, but then he sees there's a McDonald's across the street. He hollers out 'I'm going to go get a quick burger.' The only problem is that I left the keys in the ignition because he was in the car. It was one of those really, really nice rental cars in the early '90s that the doors locked when you shut the door. So I'm filling up the gas tank, he shuts the door and I'm like, 'No, Coach.' The keys get locked in the car.