‘He put recruiting on the front page’: Catching up with Forrest Davis

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Before there were 24-hour online college football recruiting updates, before there were internet sites dedicated to individual team recruiting, before there was even an internet, there was Forrest Davis.

The Birmingham-area native wrote about and talked about recruiting in a variety of print publications, on the radio and on television for nearly 30 years beginning in the late 1970s. In that time, Davis took what was once a little-discussed-but-always-important facet of college football into something that fans devoured with nearly as much enthusiasm as they did the games between the lines.

At its height in the 1990s, the Forrest Davis Southern Football Recruiting Annual was printing and distributing 50,000 copies per year, counting Hollywood legend (and ardent Florida State fan) Burt Reynolds among its subscribers. Davis also wrote a regular column during recruiting season in the Birmingham Post-Herald.

As both a host and a guest, Davis made regular appearances to discuss recruiting on numerous radio stations across Alabama. And he later hosted Countdown to Signing Day, a show dedicated entirely to college football recruiting, which aired on the SportSouth cable network out of Atlanta.

To help identify the top recruits in the Southeast, Davis relied on conversations with recruiting coordinators at the various schools in what was then the Southeastern Conference footprint — the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee. In those days, one could call assistant coaches in their offices, and they would usually either pick up the phone or return messages.

By 1979, Davis had formed a friendship with Ben Cook, a longtime Birmingham sports writer and radio personality. Cook (who died in 2015) was then editor of the SEC Sports Journal, a Sporting News-style magazine that focused on football and basketball.

One day, Cook suggested Davis begin writing a football and basketball recruiting column for the magazine. It was so popular that in 1981, Cook, Davis and business manager Ken Flowers began publishing a mail-order recruiting newsletter, the Gold Star Recruiting Guide, which they continued in various formats for the next five years.

It was during this time that Davis first came up with his now-ubiquitous “power rating” system, ranking prospects from one star up to five.

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