Tennessee basketball head coach Bruce Pearl has added yet another blue-chipper to what is surely the best recruiting class in UT basketball history. Ramar Smith, a 6′ 2″ 197-pound point guard from Detroit who originally committed to Connecticut, announced yesterday that he’ll sign with the Vols tomorrow.

Rivals.com ranks Smith as the No. 30 prospect nationally. Smith joins 6′ 7″ Duke Crews (No. 42 nationally by Rivals.com), 6′ 8″ power forward Wayne Chism (also in the 40’s nationally by Rivals.com), 6′ 5″ guard Marques Johnson (No. 37 nationally by Hoopscoop.com), and 6′ 4″ guard Josh Tabb (No. 47 nationally by Hoopscoop.com) in this year’s recruiting class.

Today marks the first day of the rest of the life of the Tennessee Volunteer football program — National Signing Day.

I don’t really follow the recruiting game much (see The House Rock Built’s post on what is hopefully not an unavoidable future absurdity of the whole process), but I am interested in the players who actually sign on to become Volunteers, and today’s the day they make it official. Beginning tomorrow morning, I plan to devote a post to each of the newest Volunteer football players, one each day until I’m finished or until I’m bored with it, whichever comes first.

Oh, and apologies to all of the subscribers. I’ve updated the feed for the site, and because my “readers” are showing up as “0,” I’m thinking I broke everybody’s existing subscriptions in the process. Sorry. The re-subscription process should, however, be relatively painless — think an 8-4 season compared to a 5-6 season — so hit the button again and follow the instructions if you want to subscribe.

If you’re aching for real-time coverage of National Signing Day, check out VOLuntarily Conservative, who’s planning to live blog the thing.

UTSports.com has the official ticker.

Sports Illustrated’s top 25 teams, including Tennessee.

Tennessee’s commits (with info on each commit) (subscription may be required in both cases) from Scout.com and Rivals.com.

Team rankings from Rivals.com and Scout.com.

According to Scout.com (subscription required), Tennessee is losing the recruiting season, ranking 33rd nationally and ranking below No. 1 Florida, No. 3 Georgia, No. 9 LSU, No. 14 Auburn, No. 20 Mississippi, No. 21 Alabama and No. 27 Kentucky. (!)

The game’s not quite over yet, though, as the Vols could finish in the top 20 or top 15 if they get some of the prospects still on their list.

Widely considered the best high school quarterback in the nation, Tim Tebow has thrown in with Urban Meyer’s spread option and committed to the Florida Gators.

Every Day Should Be Saturday live-blogged the announcement.

John Pennington has examined teams’ perceived recruiting successes in the past few years and compared them with those teams’ current rankings.

Here are Pennington’s top ten recruiters over the last five years and their current BCS rank:

1. Southern Cal: #2 in BCS
2. Michigan: #25 in BCS
3. LSU: #8 in BCS
4. Oklahoma: NR in BCS
5. Florida State: #10 in BCS
6. Miami: #7 in BCS
7. Tennessee: NR in BCS
8. Texas: #1 in BCS
9. Florida: #19 in BCS
10. Ohio State: #13 in BCS

Pennington’s info is much more exhaustive than the above list. His data brings to light several interesting facts. On one hand, the current top two BCS teams — Southern Cal and Texas — have excelled in recruiting, so that would suggest that there is a positive correlation between recruiting success and winning games.

On the other hand, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Tennessee have recruited well, and have been terrible disappointments so far this season. Plus, some of the other data shows the vast disparity between the current success of teams that have enjoyed about equal recruiting success.

My take is that we fans too often fall victim to the old necessary-sufficient fallacy. In order to win regularly, a school must have a certain level of success in luring top players to the team, but simply having good players is not enough. There are just too many other factors that come into play.

In his most recent column on GoVolsXtra (subscription required), Dave Hooker pointed out that losing a big game at home during a recruit’s official visit isn’t that big of a deal. The coaches can sell the Volunteer football program to a recruit after a big win by stressing the opportunity to play for a great team, and the coaches can sell the program after a loss by emphasizing to the recruit that the team needs him.

It is often reported that recruits are awed by the size of Neyland Stadium and the fact that it is almost always filled to capacity with enthusiastic, orange-clad fans. That’s one of the biggest reasons the Tennessee football program is tough for a recruit to resist.

But what happens when a visiting recruit looks up into those grand stands and sees the place peppered with empty seats? What happens when those in attendance are less than enthusiastic or worse, booing the home team? Such sights and sounds turn off recruits (or tip the scales to a competing university) and thereby make it much more difficult to lure blue-chippers to Knoxville.

There are apparently a lot of recruits taking their official visits to the University of Tennessee over the second half of the football season. Hooker observes that the two biggest games remaining on UT’s schedule — Alabama and Notre Dame — are away games. The only home games remaining for recruits to attend are South Carolina, Memphis, and Vanderbilt.

How will the home crowd respond if the Vols lose to either or both of Alabama and Notre Dame? If most fans choose to simply enjoy the game day atmosphere in Knoxville and Neyland Stadium, recruits will still be impressed.

But many purported Volunteer fans seem to be extraordinarily fickle and only enjoy the game day atmosphere if Tennessee wins. For this reason, another loss or two this season will likely result in sparse and restless home crowds that turn off visiting recruits.

Fans are largely responsible for the team’s recruiting successes or failures. Fickle fans are bad for the team and by their behavior and response to losses, they deprive themselves of the very thing they desire.