02/14 at 01:14 AM

In the end, Auburn’s consensus top-5 signing class might have become just that because of a real-life game of “telephone” between committed players and those still on the fence.

Only in this version, the Auburn version, the message wasn’t skewed when it reached its final destination. Delivered by early, high-profile commitments such as LaDarius Owens and Michael Dyer, it stayed constant and consistent all the way until Joel Bonomolo faxed the 32nd and final National Letter of Intent.

Come to Auburn. It’ll be fun. All the cool kids are doing it.

Consider it friendly peer pressure that just so happened to unify many members of what might just be the best signing class in program history.

“You don’t want to go to a school and lose,” Owens said. “You want to get the most help around you as possible. You want to be around people that are your type of people and have the same goals as you.”

Without question, the tactics employed by Owens, Dyer and any other proactive commitment with a cell phone and access to the Internet helped keep prospective players thinking about Auburn when the phone book full of NCAA recruiting restrictions prevented coaches from doing it themselves.

“It’s huge,” Rivals.com regional analyst Barton Simmons said. “It’s one of the most under-appreciated aspects of the recruiting game, getting the big-name guys in early and building something that other high-profile kids want to be a part of.”

Owens was one of the first high-profile prospects to commit to Auburn. The nephew of Auburn’s first-ever African-American player, Owens announced his pledge one day after the Tigers’ season-opening victory against Louisiana Tech.

That gave Owens roughly five months, one official visit and a few other unofficial visits to reel in as many potential future teammates as possible before National Signing Day.

His resume isn’t too shabby. Owens could only think of two of Auburn’s 32 signees with whom he hasn’t made some sort of contact.

And in fairness to Owens’ due diligence, one of those players was safety Ryan Smith (Cordova), who was a Kentucky commitment all the way until Signing Day.

“When you’re on the football field, it’s like the battlefield; you want to go to war with your brother,” Owens said. “You want to know they’ve got your back and are not out there for themselves.”

Owens said he cultivated the bulk of his relationships at “Big Cat Weekend.” The now-infamous event, which subsequently resulted in six secondary violations, brought some of the nation’s most talented prospects onto Auburn’s campus for a weekend of pie-eating contests, home run derbies and all other sorts of non-football activities.

It gave recruits more time to bond and relax, Owens said, which helped establish an everlasting pact among a number of that weekend’s visitors. More than 10 of the players that weekend signed with Auburn, and a number of them, like Owens, committed early, allowing them to serve as ambassadors for the program during the crunch-time period of recruiting after the regular season.

“It was a stress-free weekend,” Owens said. “Just being down there, even though we were at Auburn and we were being recruited, we were just having fun.”

That weekend of fun helped make the serious discussions thereafter more of the roundtable variety, as players were able to bounce thoughts and ideas off each other via texts, instant messages and tweets.

And while a number of signees have cited down-to-earth honesty and frankness as reasons why they trusted Auburn’s coaches over those who may have promised starting positions from the start, hearing it from someone their own age provided a different perspective.

“They will never fib to their peers,” safeties coach Tommy Thigpen said. “They might not tell the coaches the truth sometimes, but when it comes to their teammates and guys that are their age, they’ll tell those guys exactly what they’re thinking.”

The contact between Auburn’s signees hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Coach Gene Chizik said the group had an “uncommon bond” and that it “seems like so many guys in this class have already been playing together for about a year.” Owens, who also made visits to Alabama and LSU, said he thinks Auburn’s 2010 class is “closer than any other recruiting class in the nation.”

If that’s true, he shouldn’t have any guilt taking some credit for it.

“He’s unique because he’s a charismatic kid,” Thigpen said. “Cut the tape on him and you see him play, just like when you see Michael Dyer play; you want to play with the kid.”

The trend certainly isn’t unique to Auburn. A number of schools have already started stockpiling recruits in hopes of not only securing top-tier talent early in the game, but potentially reeling in an extra recruiter or two — free of charge.

A little more than one week into the 2011 recruiting season, all but two SEC schools have at least one commitment. Auburn has two. LSU has seven.

“Kids are very cognizant with what’s going on with them and their class and around the country,” Simmons said. “They definitely want to be a part of a special class and want to assure their future being around good players.”

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