CRESTVIEW — To scroll through Marquis McClain’s Twitter feed is to take a virtual tour of a wildly successful summer of recruiting for the Crestview rising senior.
The wide receiver has gotten in the habit of tweeting out the logos of schools interested in him.
He’s posted a lot of logos lately.
First comes Auburn, which offered McClain on June 20. That precedes his quips on a visit to Tennessee and a June 6 picture with Mississippi State University coach Dan Mullen.
MSU's Bulldogs — which topped college football rankings for a brief period this past season — were the first SEC school to offer McClain. That came in on May 19.
MSU's bid could theoretically be labeled as the beginning of McClain’s high-profile status as a high school recruit. Before Mullen extending the roster spot, the student-athlete had been picking up offers from lower Division I schools, the kind that Mississippi State would throttle in early non-conference games.
There were Troy and Western Kentucky and Middle Tennessee and Louisiana Lafayette, but McClain's offer sheet was mostly devoid of the upper-tier schools that lately have been coming in droves.
McClain has done his part to increase his exposure, beginning with 4:20 a.m. wake-up calls “so I can grind before and after school,” he wrote on Twitter.
He has attended a number of camps, including The Opening, a four-day competition in Charlotte where he clocked at a 4.58-second 40-yard-dash time and flashed just less than a 40-inch vertical jump.
Brian Stump, a director of Nike Combines, recently put out a “sleeper alert” on the Crestview wideout. Later in the day, he ranked McClain as the second best receiver at the camp.
McClain was behind only Cade Carney, a Wake Forest commit out of North Carolina.
The aptly named camp immediately burst McClain’s recruitment wide open. Within two weeks, Middle Tennessee and Troy offered him, which were followed by Mississippi State, Purdue, Appalachian State, Minnesota and, finally, Auburn.
McClain is far from finished. He reportedly has interest from more than 20 schools, including Wisconsin, Virginia, Central Florida and Penn State, among others.
As he routinely writes on the social media site, he’s just a #ManOnAMission.
Travis Mewhirter is a sports reporter for the Northwest Florida Daily News. Send him an email, contact him on Twitter or call 315-4432.
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: #ManOnAMission: More than 20 colleges eye Crestview football star