(02-03-2021 05:23 PM)Cletus Wrote:  

(02-03-2021 04:55 PM)k2tigers Wrote:  UTK won't be relevant for a LONG time, not that they have been recently, but I mean not top 25 relevant

This story from AL.com confirms your statement.

Tennessee the only loser on National Signing Day

That’s the joy of earning scholarships to go to college. There are no losers in that game. Just maybe better winners.

Not Tennessee, though. Volunteers football has problems for their problems, and it just keeps getting worse for Rocky Top. Tennessee took a hard ‘L’ by choice on Wednesday, and had to put in work to do it, too.

Tennessee is so lost these days it even figured out a way to lose at a thing where everyone’s a winner, National Signing Day. Or what used to be the traditional NSD, but is now just a day to sign scholarships.

A team that has lost 14 consecutive years to the Crimson Tide, Tennessee and its new football staff might now be dead on arrival around pockets of Alabama for what it did on Tuesday to Oxford High School football player Roc Taylor, who ended up signing with Memphis on Wednesday. In a scenario that almost feels like it was orchestrated by a public-relations saboteur, Tennessee, according to Oxford coach Keith Etheredge, unexpectedly pulled Taylor’s scholarship offer less than 24 hours before one of the biggest days of his young life.

If true, that’s shameful, but also glaringly, in the words of Etheredge, “bush league.” New Tennessee coach Josh Heupel just made his task of fixing Tennessee’s mess that much more difficult by the way he managed this. I tried to get in touch with Tennessee’s coaching staff to understand the Vols’ side of the story, but, shockingly, no one would talk.

Now, understand, football recruiting can be a pretty grimy deal, but this goes beyond the pale because it gets worse. The way Taylor’s saga all played out was a window into the ugly (and unhealthy) back room of football recruiting.

After allegedly pulling the offer, Tennessee then tried to get Taylor to take responsibility for the decision. A Tennessee staffer suggested, according to Etheredge, that Taylor announce he was flipping schools. Happens all the time, of course, but Etheredge wasn’t letting Tennessee off the hook so easily.

This was on Tennessee, he said. Taylor had stayed loyal to Tennessee for months and months, and passed on scholarship offers to schools like Florida, Florida State and Georgia Tech. Even when Tennessee fired Jeremy Pruitt, Taylor apparently still was planning to attend Tennessee. His Twitter timeline is filled with artwork of him wearing Tennessee uniforms.

Making it somehow even worse still, a coach who hasn’t even been officially hired by Tennessee then tried to shift the blame on Taylor for maybe not being able to qualify. Gross. I don’t know Taylor’s academic standing in his senior semester of high school during a pandemic, but I do know that for many months last year schools and students were so disrupted by COVID-19 that admissions offices all over the country waved required test scores for this year’s graduating class.

The most obvious answer is probably the closest to the truth. It’s all just more stunning incompetence by Tennessee, an outfit that launched an investigation to dig up dirt on itself so it could fire Pruitt with cause in order to try and weasel its way out of a huge buyout. It’s just more grinding unprofessionalism from a place that fired former athletics director John Currie because he wanted to hire Greg Schiano (now at Rutgers) and Mike Leach (now at Mississippi State). It’s just more dysfunction by a university that forced Currie’s replacement, athletics director Phil Fulmer, a Tennessee football legend, to go away amid another sweeping volley of embarrassment.

At some point, you gotta wonder if Tennessee is trying to sabotage its football team into an irrelevant oblivion. Pruitt is suing Tennessee for his $12.6 million buyout, and they’ll probably settle out of court because we all know Tennessee doesn’t want the light of truth shined on its laughably absurd kangaroo court.

Tennessee, at this point in its ridiculous and obnoxious tragedy, is dragging its entire conference down into the mud with it.

Taylor is far better off at Memphis, and for Tennessee that’s the cold reality of being the winner of National Signing Day’s award for worst run football program in the country.