Look who’s having a stupid contest.

Georgia fan:  Gee, the latest bunch of recruiting violations UGA was hit were stupid and petty.

Tennessee fan:  Hold our beer!

On Oct. 16, before UT played a home game against Ole Miss, fans packed the Vol Walk pathway, where players and coaches make their traditional trek from Gibbs Hall to Gate 21 of Neyland Stadium.

Recruits were at the football practice facility and overseen by UT’s recruiting support staff. They were supposed to watch Vol Walk from a parking lot overlooking the route. But congestion from the huge number of fans hemmed in the recruits and botched that plan.

“After getting stuck at the top of the street where buses would unload the football team in approximately 5-10 minutes, and being unable to get back to an area away from the street because of directions from police officers working crowd control, (the assistant director of recruiting) made the decision to direct the prospects toward the stadium as quickly as possible,” the university report said.

“At that point, because of the number of fans, this involved walking down the street and created an impermissible gameday simulation.”

So rather than watch Vol Walk, recruits participated in it — or, at least, a preview of it before the team did the real thing.

Yes, there are sanctions for that.

UT took action and self-imposed sanctions: rules training for its staff; reduction of recruiting contact opportunities by one; designed different route for recruits around Vol Walk to avoid a repeat occurrence; and coach Josh Heupel was notified that a similar violation may result in his suspension for one or more games, which is standard language for deterring future infractions.

The SEC further ruled that UT could not have in-person off-campus contact with the involved recruits for 14 days, beginning Dec. 8, and the assistant director of recruiting could not engage in recruiting activities from Dec. 10-12.

And the NCAA required UT to suspend the assistant director of recruiting for one game, and the football program reduced its recruiting evaluation days by two.

Dumb and dumber:  Tennessee and the NCAA, a meteor recruiting violation.

Looks like they caught Kirby’s bag man.

Weiszer:  “Georgia reported three NCAA violations involving the football program for impermissible recruiting inducements between October and the end of December in its latest quarterly summary.”

Here’s the big one:

One violation resulted in football staff members being prohibited from going with recruits or their guests to the UGA bookstore.

That stemmed from am Oct. 17  violation when a non-coaching staff member gave a $50 loan to a recruit’s parent to complete a purchase. The parent said he would repay the loan but the staff member failed to collect the repayment when the family hurried to leave campus for a flight.

Georgia stopped recruiting the player and the staff member was barred from recruiting activities for 90 days.

Fitty dollah!  Wait ’til Gator fans get ahold of that one.

Today, in gaps

You gotta love Seth Emerson’s lede this morning ($$).

Goodness, what an exodus of talent is hitting the Georgia defense: Three former five-star recruits, two more who were ranked in the top 100 of their class, and three more who were four-stars. And that doesn’t even include Jordan Davis.

That strips down the poor Georgia defense to only returning:

• 10 former five-star recruits

• Six more who were top-100 recruits

• 15 more who were four-star recruits

Kirby Smart’s cupboard, not very bare at all as it turns out.

Yeah, there’s some serious experience walking out the door, but that’s life in college football these days if yours is an elite program.  Better to have talent on hand to replace it than not.  And maybe there’s a transfer or two in the works, to boot.

I’ll take my chances with it, thank you very much.

Decided schematic advantage, my ass

Inject this directly into my veins ($$):

Most of the time when a coach gets fired, the writing is on the wall long before he has a losing season. Justin Fuente at Virginia Tech. Dan Mullen at Florida. Clay Helton at USC. The list of coaches in that same boat goes on. All of these guys were failing to meet expectations in the recruiting realm, then boom, a losing season turns into a firing. The same thing applies for coaches who have been recruiting well. How many times did I write in this space that Kirby Smart was eventually going to win a national title? All you have to do is look at the recruiting rankings.

When the inevitable round of 2022 best coaches lists turns up, how many pundits who had Mullen ranked ahead of Smart last year are going to acknowledge they didn’t know what they were talking about?

Always be ‘crootin’, on steroids

Kirby being able to take pictures like this now is dangerous for the rest of CFB pic.twitter.com/z1NXTgXvYo

— Blayne Gilmer (@BGilmer18) January 15, 2022

Recruiting metaphor of the day

Have not:

It’s the first day of the recruiting contact period, and #Mizzou’s Eli Drinkwitz and Marcus Johnson just pulled up to Lee’s Summit North high school in a dump truck. LSN is the home of 2022 OL signee Armand Membou and 2023 four-star OL Cayden Green pic.twitter.com/ffncVc0Qg9

— Mitchell Forde (@Mitchell4D) January 14, 2022

Have:

Kirby on campus today!#GoNorth pic.twitter.com/iweko2Ky0x

— North Gwinnett Athletics (@NGHSAthletics) January 14, 2022

That’s how one team caps off its postseason with a national championship and the other loses a bowl game to Army.

Recruiting **is** coaching.

I don’t know about you, but for me, one of the more satisfying developments of this season has been the debunking of the whole game day coaching/scheming > recruiting narrative that swirled around the stock media evaluation of college football’s head coaches last summer.  I mean, you’d think anyone who saw where Charlie Weis’ decided schematic advantage got him would know better.

Anyway, here we are in January, 2022.  Dan Mullen, surely the poster boy of that line of thinking, is currently unemployed, while Nick Saban and Kirby Smart, surely the two best recruiters in the game, are playing for a national championship.  Go read a Florida message board and see how their fans have suddenly found religion about recruiting.  People are freaking out about Texas A&M’s recruiting class.  And Ari Wasserman has this to say ($$):  “If you’re reading this mailbag, the hope is that you acknowledge the profound impact that recruiting has on the eventual national title winners.”

Not that it means much in the vast scheme of things, but I’m genuinely curious to see where Kirby Smart winds up on this year’s head coach rankings lists — not because of his relative merit, but to see if the lesson has started to sink in with the pundit class.

If you don’t ask, they’ll never know.

Shane Beamer is perplexed.

“It’s the name of the game,” Beamer said. “I know what we’re legally allowed to do at South Carolina and that’s what we’re doing. I can’t speak for other schools and promises they make. Frankly, I had parents call me over the weekend, wanting to know what you can do for my son, from a NIL standpoint. What can you promise us?”

“I can’t promise you anything,” Beamer said. “I can’t set up deals for you. Anybody that tells you they can, they’re lying to you and not being honest…

Which begs a certain question, doesn’t it?

Gappin’: the graphic story

Come, for watching Georgia’s rise over the last decade …

Not so sure that college football has a “parity problem”. I think it could better be described as a “Nick Saban problem”

Composite recruiting points on 247 since 2011 ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/rnMLg6T02I

— CJ (@CJOlson2000) December 19, 2021

… but stay for Florida’s rise and fall completely out of the graphic.

When one door opens, somebody’s there to kick it closed.

You may have heard that Billy Napier just pried away a key recruiting staffer from UGA.  (She’s someone who worked for Napier at Louisiana before coming to Athens and the move wasn’t a surprise.)  Anyway, I got a kick out of her Twitter announcement, or at least one part of it.

Gator Nation – I am SOOO excited to get to work!!! I promise, recruiting time is never out of season!!! Now, let’s have go have some fun 🤩🎉 https://t.co/Dw5MdWhGQI

— Katie Turner (@katieturner0087) December 17, 2021

“I promise, recruiting time is never out of season!!!”  Nothing like taking a gratuitous shot at the Portal Master™ on your way in the door.  I’d like to think that’s the Dawg in her, because I’m a romantic.