Spanning the globe, or at least Utah and parts of the United States, for your latest sports tidbits . . .

Of course, the big news this week was a 17-year-old from Washington calling a press conference at a Salt Lake City sports grill to announce he was going to BYU. Jake Heaps is rated as the No. 1 quarterback in the nation by Scout.com and perhaps just as significant as his committing to BYU was his bringing along a couple of more top prep athletes to join him. It's fun for fans to get excited about the future and what might happen in 2012 or 2013, as long as their expectations don't get out of whack.

An article earlier this year on SI.com, showed that quarterback is the most difficult position to evaluate for those coming out of high school. From the 2005 high school class, only a handful of the top-rated quarterbacks have turned out to be successful college QBs. Just 17 of the top 50-rated QBs have even played at least one full season of major-college football, and only nine ever finished a season ranked among the top 40 passers in the nation.

Besides Mark Sanchez, the other top QBs that year were Ryan Perrilloux, Jonathan Crompton, Harrison Beck, Jake Christensen and Derek Shaw. Give yourself a star if you've heard of any of them. Among the quarterbacks further down the list in the '05 class were Texas' Colt McCoy and Missouri's Chase Daniel.

So even though the odds are higher that Heaps will flame out rather than lead the Cougars to a national championship, sports are all about dreaming and anticipating, which gives BYU fans the right to be doing backflips and cartwheels right now . . .

Speaking of No. 1 athletes, did you see the latest issue of Sports Illustrated? It features a 16-year-old from Las Vegas named Bryce Harper, who is supposed to be so good he would be one of the top two picks in next month's major league draft. The only problem is he's a sophomore in high school. It doesn't say it in the article, but from what I can gather, the boy is LDS. I'm pretty sure he won't end up at BYU, however, and if he's as good as they say he is, he will sign a multimillion-dollar baseball contract within two years .

Harper is just the 11th high school athlete to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated over the past 50 years — the first since a guy named Le?Bron James in 2002. One of the first was Utah's own Bruce Hardy of Bingham, who was called "Best Schoolboy Athlete" back in 1974. Hardy went on to play tight end for Arizona State and the Miami Dolphins . . .