The Courtship of Jayden Wayne Just Got Intense

The 5-star recruit from Tacoma receives the full treatment in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Jayden Wayne is a high school sophomore. 

A mere young lad from Tacoma.

Barely a hallway presence at Lincoln High.

Yet suddenly he's a 5-star college football recruit, something similar to a home buyer with lots of cash to spend being shown all kinds of expensive real estate from Montlake to Tuscaloosa.

From here on, everyone except his mother is going to tell this budding pass rusher over and over how absolutely great he is, that he's one of the finest human beings to ever walk the planet with shoulder pads and a helmet on.

Mom will be left to remind Wayne that he's still just a kid, and that she doesn't care how well he knows Nick Saban or Dabo Swinney, he still needs to take out the garbage.

If Wayne doesn't come to Washington, the Jimmy Lake critics will suggest the Husky coach somehow has failed miserably at his job.

Wherever he goes, and if he's as good as they say he could be, the suggestion might be made that maybe Wayne sit out his senior year at Lincoln to protect the investment and be gone from the college scene after two seasons.

It's the going thing.

Which will leave all of the subscribers to Recruit-R-Us to quickly scramble and find the next young Northwest prospect to deify and critique in every manner.

Wayne just attended the Saban camp in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which people down there will tell you is another slice of Southern heaven, with the greatest college football ever assembled on Earth.

From the nonstop social-media postings, it appears that young Wayne got the full treatment and didn't get out of there without being asked by BamaInsider reps to tell them how great the place is while he hears from them how great the place is. 

Alabama Diehards got their hands on him, too.

It's all part of the scripted visit. The in-depth interview. The posed photos all in red. Yes, "Amazing" is the prerequisite word. 

Remember, from Seattle to the South, they're all working you.

Future five-star DE (currently ranked No.13 overall in the 2023 class) Jayden Wayne said #Alabama is everything he expected, “Amazing!” He goes in-depth on his first trip with the Tide and can’t wait to return https://t.co/lEkdTpSm4D @bamainsider #RollTide pic.twitter.com/d4QjGveuXh

— Andrew Bone (@AndrewJBone) June 3, 2021

It's certain the Bama football facilities are unmatched anywhere. That's what Bear Bryant, Nick Saban and 18 national championships will get you. 

However, if Wayne went there expecting to be totally overwhelmed by the entire geographic experience, he was probably more than a little surprised by it. Maybe even disappointed.

He just went from Tacoma, with its population of 200,000 and views of Mount Rainier and Puget Sound, to scruffy little Tuscaloosa, an inland, sometimes tornado-ravaged town with a population of 100,000. 

He knows way more about an incoming tide than they do with the Tide. The place is 230 miles from the Gulf of Mexico.

Wayne went from the big city to Puyallup with an accent, a town built around a football empire.

Remember, Augusta, Georgia, has a nice golf course and that's it. 

Everywhere he goes, Wayne will need to take it all in — the glorious and the horrendous.

The genuine love and the true hustle.

Whether to spend his supposed short college stay in a place that dissects everything last little thing he does to what kind of Subway sandwich he orders. 

Of course, that could be anywhere.

For now, Wayne needs to get a good look at everything, take mental notes and just smile.

And remember that it's his choice. 

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