June Jones opted not to honor the commitment offensive line recruit Ralston Drews made to SMU under the terms proposed by his predecessor Phil Bennett, something SMU went as far as warning incoming recruits about in a form letter. From the Dallas Morning News:

He didn’t even get nervous when SMU took 71 days to hire June Jones.

And the form letter Ralston received in November telling him the new coach had right to refuse all commitments?

He didn’t think anything of it. He had a letter of confirmation. He heard nothing to make him believe he wouldn’t be a Mustang.

Until last week, anyway. That’s when Ralston, a 6-1, 335-pound lineman from Tyler Lee, got a quickie course in today’s college athletics.

Ralston won’t be a member of Jones’ first recruiting class. He isn’t the first kid that’s happened to, and he won’t be the last.

This is simply “the landscape of college football,” as an SMU official told Ralston’s high school coach.

This shows Jones clearly doesn’t buy into the principle of “LEMSDAY!” espoused by Ed Orgeron and other coaches who honor prior commitments made by the outgoing coach they’re replacing at a university. Indeed, as the column suggests, Jones may be doing Drews a favor by dumping him in time to shop around his commitment a bit; he would just play four years, never see the field, and spend the whole time wondering if he should have gone somewhere else.

It is not a rosy beginning to Jones’ life in Dallas, PR-wise. And who would have imagined that, given his previous history of silky-smooth media relations?