Ask any college football coach the hardest position to recruit, and he won't hesitate answering "placekicker."

"It's a crapshoot," Kentucky coach Rich Brooks said.

"If you go scout a kicker at a game, the only thing you might see is the kid kick in pregame and a couple of kickoffs," Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmer said.

"You see a kid in high school kickoff into the end zone, and he gets here having to kick off a shorter tee, and he's kicking off to the 10-yard line," Arkansas coach Houston Nutt said.

Nutt readily admits he's had a problem finding a consistent placekicker and/or kickoff man since taking over at Arkansas in 1998. In fact, he's mostly had placekickers who could barely crack 70 percent on field goals, a huge comedown for a school that had back-to-back almost 90 percent placekickers in 1988 (allAmerican Kendall Trainor at 88.9) and '89 (first-team All-Southwest Conference Todd Wright at 87.0).

It's getting harder and harder to find high school placekickers worth a scholarship. Four SEC schools signed five placekickers in the recruiting class of '06, including two by Tennessee and one each by Kentucky, Ole Miss and Arkansas.

College kickers are required to kick field goals and extra points off the ground like pros in the NFL. This season, college players can use a mere one-inch tee on kickoffs. In high school, kickers can use tees for field goals and two-inch tees for kickoffs.

"Now all of a sudden a high school (kid) has to make that transition to no tee, and there's the increased pressure of a huge crowd," Brooks said.

The best a college coach can hope for in recruiting a placekicker is having him attend his summer football camp.

"You get to see a kid kick live and you get to evaluate their mental toughness," said Fulmer, who has had five All-SEC placekickers. "You get to see how they fight through it when they miss one or get one blocked."

The biggest problem, though, is most placekickers receive as little coaching in college as they did in high school.

If you don't believe that, just ask former Mississippi State coach Jackie Sherrill. He became such a kicking game guru during his head coaching career at four different schools that he's now a kicking consultant.

He's already visited eight major programs in BCS conferences this season, and he's stunned at what he has found.

"We spend all this time developing all these different positions," Sherrill said, "but the placekickers, the holders, the punters and the snappers are basically out at practice on an island by themselves. So many of them have talent, but they never get better. It's like a golfer who teaches himself. He never knows why he hooks it or slices it."

Sherrill said the problem for most college coaches is they don't know how to evaluate kicking prospects, then don't know how to coach them.

"When coaches see a kid kick in high school, that kid isn't kicking against a heavy rush," Sherrill said. "Because of that, he can kick it farther in high school. He gets to college against a real rush, he has to change his motion and his rhythm.

"Most college coaches don't know how to time kickers properly. They don't how to film them in practice. Kickers need to be taught so thoroughly that they can go in a film room by themselves and know what they did right and wrong."

Underset: .13 inches/ 1 lines