Here's why Tom Lemming drives thousands of miles to evaluate high school football talent
Some of the top Arizona high school football underclassmen (2026, 2027 classes) gathered at Scottsdale Desert Mountain High School on the first day of April to fill out paperwork, then be videotaped and interviewed by Tom Lemming.
Most of them never heard of him or probably ever saw the massive book he puts out filled with information about high school recruits.
They didn't know he has traveled by rental car every year since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 to get an up-close look at high school football players all over the country to put in his Prep Football Report, once a magazine that has grown to more than 300 pages, loaded with profiles from New York to California and all points in between, with a few pages devoted to his travels.
Arizona was his latest stop. From there, he was headed to San Diego, then Los Angeles and the Bay Area.
He has seen Arizona grow over the last two decades with his annual stops.
In Arizona this year, he interviewed Desert Mountain 2026 lineman Tony Cumberland and Queen Creek 2026 quarterback Tait Reynolds, who are Nos. 1 and 2 in The Arizona Republic's Top 100 2026 football recruits. This was his first time at Desert Mountain in Scottsdale. Last year, he was at Hamilton in Chandler.
"There are a lot of players here," Lemming said. "You see a lot of people moving in here. I didn't know about this school until a few years ago. They're expanding."
He could just do it all online, look at videotapes of kids' highlights, see them at camps, and evaluate their websites. But he wants to see what they look like in person and make sure their heights and weights are accurate.
Lemming, 69, who is from Chicago, is old-school through and through. He's the pioneer of evaluating high school football talent in Tom Lemming's Prep Football Report. He's been doing this since 1978, when there was no internet. His report became the college football coach's Bible.
About six years after he started doing it, a couple more evaluators followed his lead.
Now, in the age of the internet, it seems everybody has a recruiting database.
"There were about three of us for 15 years, until the internet came around," Lemming said. "It was actually better for me. I used to write about 300 guys I could see. Now I can see about 2,000, because there are big groups. The LA group is between 75 and 100. It helps out that way. I go to Texas twice. I did Dallas and Houston."
Traveling the country evaluating players
Lemming works his way up and down every state.
He's put on countless miles on rental cars. Two years in a row in Wyoming he said he got caught in a massive snowstorm, driving through 70-mile-per-hour winds.
"It took me 15 hours to go from Denver to Salt Lake City," Lemming said. "Usually, it's about seven or eight hours."
He rents the car out of Chicago. For this swing from Arizona, starting in Willcox, then to the Valley, he'll head to the California areas and on to Portland and Seattle.
"Only 7,000 more miles to go," he said, before he's back home in Chicago. He says he'll put about 11,000 miles total on this Western United States trek, evaluating top talent with 28 days on the road.
When he returns the rental, he tries to get out quick, "because they think there's a mistake when they see 11,000 miles."
Lemming didn't fear flying after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. It was because flights were being canceled and delayed and he had to find another way to get around the country to evaluate players without being late.
"After all the flights were canceled and delayed, I decided to drive and I haven't been late in 20 years," Lemming said. "But I like it."
Lemming devotes several pages of his personal travels in his magazine. He writes about sites and things that interest him, the people he has met, including rock icon Jon Bon Jovi last year.
Lemming's passion was born out of his love for baseball, growing up on the south side of Chicago, playing the game from sunup to sundown. His first Prep Football Report came out in 1979 with interviews conducted with John Elway, Eric Dickerson and Dan Marino, before they became household names. He discovered players like Larry Fitzgerald and Randy Moss on his journeys. He's been the CBS Sports Network's recruiting analyst with the "Tom Lemming Report."
Lemming had a 52-second part in the 2009 movie "The Blind Side," which won an Oscar for Sandra Bullock. He became good friends with her co-star, singer Tim McGraw, going to his concerts when he plays in Chicago. Lemming played himself, the guy who picks the U.S. Army All-American Bowl players.
"The director calls me up and says, 'I got good news and bad news. You're in the scene but I had to take some out,'" Lemming said. "I did 13 hours (on the set). I said, 'Can't you take out some of Sandra's scenes? She has so many.' He thought I was kidding. I was half-kidding."
To suggest human-interest story ideas and other news, reach Obert atrichard.obert@arizonarepublic.com or 602-316-8827. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter:@azc_obert
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Tom Lemming's passion to analyze football prospects started in 1978
