Will Ed Orgeron Take Down Lane Kiffin? NCAA Begins Looking Harder at Story
Ed Orgeron’s stories have changed since they started being told.
The problem is, what he is on record for saying may be enough to land USC in hot water with the NCAA and put Kiffin under scrutiny of the people who are already none too fond of him.
The problem, at least the one we’ll discuss in this article, is the wham-bam way the news of Kiffin’s hiring by USC went down and the mistakes made as the frenzy of the moment set in.
You would think a former head coach and current recruiting coordinator would know the recruiting rules. Apparently Orgeron did not.
At the time of Kiffin’s hiring, teams were in “Dead Time,” a time in which coaches can not initiate contact with recruits.
The problem is Orgeron has already admitted to contacting “several” recruits he was not supposed to have contacted. He may as well have admitted it, because there are plenty of witness who actually heard him doing it when one one of the athletes put him on speaker phone for others to hear.
Now if you’re going to break the rules, you might want to cover your tracks. No one can confuse Ed Orgeron with James Bond, because many of those calls were placed on a phone that was being paid for by the University of Tennessee.
Records of those calls are very easy to find.
Now, Orgeron is changing his story. At one of his press briefings since taking over at USC, he said, “In my knowledge, I followed the NCAA rules correctly and did what was best for the recruitment of the family and the young men. In my knowledge, I did not knowingly break a rule.”
BleacherReport.com
1/25/10
Magnolia Tribune
