What's Not to Like?

"I really don't have a favorite," Carlo Calabrese said. "They are all equal now. I need to take my visits and see. I want a school with good tradition and to play for winning coaches. I just want to make sure I have a good feeling around them and I like coaches that are tough and make you work. Tradition is important too because I want a school that is known for football, but academics are..."

Carlo Calabrese, the 6-foot-2, 225-pound four-star linebacker from Verona, N.J., has eight scholarship offers: Notre Dame, Florida, Rutgers, Maryland, Syracuse, Pittsburgh and North Carolina State. He denies a leader.

"I really don't have a favorite," Calabrese said. "They are all equal now. I need to take my visits and see. I want a school with good tradition and to play for winning coaches. I just want to make sure I have a good feeling around them and I like coaches that are tough and make you work. Tradition is important too because I want a school that is known for football, but academics are number one for me."

Calabrese says he doesn't plan to make an early decision. "I'll wait until after my season," he said.

Although he denies a leader, he said he favors Notre Dame, Penn State, Rutgers, Florida and Boston College. All of his favorites have offered except the Nittany Lions. He attended junior days at Notre Dame and Penn State already.

"The Notre Dame Junior Day was real good," he said. "They are an academic school and they have a really high grad rate. They are still a young team and I think they'll be really good in a few years. I like the new linebacker coach (Jon Tenuta) because he likes to blitz a lot and I think he'll really help the team. They are also getting a lot of great recruits so things are going well for them."

While the Nittany Lions didn't offer him during their junior day, Calabrese says they are recruiting him hard. "It was real nice," he said. "I loved getting to tour the campus. It's a beautiful place and even though the campus is big, everything is close together so it's not hard to get around.

"I also liked getting to see them practice and scrimmage because you could see what it takes to play there and how hard they work. After we watched them practice we broke off with our position coaches and the linebacker coaches talked about all the tradition they have there. It's Linebacker U."

The only other school that Calabrese has already visited is Rutgers. "They are only 45 minutes from here," he said. "I don't care if I go far away or not. That doesn't matter to me.

"I like Rutgers because of how they are being built up," he said. "Coach Greg Schiano built them up from nothing and now they are a highly-ranked team."

This weekend (April 12) Calabrese plans to attend the Florida spring game. "I really like the Gators," he said. "It's Florida, what's not to like? The weather there is great and the team is good every year."

Although Calabrese doesn't plan to attend any camps during the summer, he says he will try and visit a few schools, one of which will be Boston College. "They've already offered me and I've heard that it's a really nice place," he said. "I guess the campus is supposed to be great and they've been doing good the last few years too."

Calabrese, Scout.com's No. 12 middle linebacker, says he never followed a specific school growing up and that his parents don't have a preference either.

He finished his junior season with 104 solo tackles and six sacks, while helping lead his team to an 11-2 record. Calabrese benches 315-pounds and squats 400.

"I've got a nose for the ball," he said. "I know where the ball is going and I read the field well. I have good instincts and I'm real tough. I like to hit, but I still want to get bigger and improve my speed. I'd like to hit harder and not let anyone knock me down."

He reports a 3.0 core GPA and a 23 ACT.