What SEC coach...
...has already pissed off enough coaches to merit seven different complaints, all from different coaches? And not all from inside the conference? HMMMMmmm... [/gossipy news columnistspeak]
That's what you'll get in this week's installment of Memphis Dry Ribs in the Commercial-Appeal, a tidbit lodged discreetly in the final paragraph covering a conversation with SEC Commish Mike Slive. The essentials:
The one thing that the conference needs to continue to work on is its image as a renegade league that doesn't mind breaking a rule or two or 10 or 20...Slive remains steadfast in his goal. Here's hoping he gets there, but erasing cheating in recruiting is hard. MDR has had a couple of football coaches tell him that one coach currently in the league was turned in by seven different schools (and not all in the SEC) for alleged recruiting violations.
Who could this be? (Legal department would like us to insert the following blanket "allegedly" falling across all that follows, to be followed by numerous redundant "alleged"s.) Given geography, reputation, and the source of the story, we'd have to allegedly suspect that this points an alleged unsubtle finger at The Orgeron, who Chris Scelfo of Tulane already called out for recruiting talent off the Green Wave after Hurricane Katrina hit.
Rumors swirl around the Orgeron already: his cutthroat recruiting tactics, his Cajun tirades involving him challenging his whole team to a fight, and his ability to mesmerize dogs and talk to snakes...however, this can't be good for the 2nd year coach at Ole Miss, if only because Slive letting something like this slip in what he surely knew to be a public forum serves as a warning shot across the bow of the S.S. Crazyman currently docked in Oxford. An example could be made if Slive really does feel like the conference needs a good public polishing--mostly in terms of lost bowls and scholarships for an offender--and being one of the non-sacred cows of the conference would make a program like Ole Miss a ripe, tasty, batter-fried target for a commisioner looking for a scapegoat.
Why wouldn't this be Urban Meyer, you ask? Probably because, outside of the very, very sketchy claims that C.J. Spiller's recruitment broke some rules, he's not had anyone go on the record against him. That and the source being the Memphis paper are enough to point us away from the admittedly very, very aggressive recruiting of Meyer.
A Southern specialty: tasty, batter-fried recruiting complaints.