It's like we're losing recruits to Wake Forest or Maryland or somebody

Georgia Tech has lost its fifth committed recruit in two weeks.

Southwest Guilford(NC) QB Airyn Willis confirmed to the AJC late Tuesday that he will be signing a National Letter of Intent Wednesday with (friggin') Wake Forest. Willis had been committed to Tech since April and had shown no public indication before Tuesday of having contemplated the switch.

From the AJC story:

“We [had] a really close relationship with Coach [Andy] McCollum and we hated to disappoint him,” Willis said. “But like my Dad told him, people have to understand we have to do what’s in my best interest. Somebody has to be disappointed and unfortunately it’s Georgia Tech.”

Indeed Coach McCollum was responsible for Willis's recruitment and dropped the ball once again, just as he did with Stephon Tuitt two weeks prior. Rivals also reports that McCollum was assigned, along with A-backs coach Lamar Owens, to the ill-fated recruitment of Tre Jackson. In fact does the above quotation not look all too familiar?

... somebody’s going to have to be disappointed and today it’s Georgia Tech. Tomorrow it’s going to be Georgia Tech and the next day it’s going to Georgia Tech because recruiting stops now.

Is Coach McCollum a crack recruiting coordinator or is he the proverbial "nice guy" who's "going to have to be disappointed" as the girl he loves chooses another man while he watches broken-heartedly from the "friend zone"? Poor schlub.

News of Willis's decision was first broken earlier in the day by the Greensboro News & Record, which cited "multiple sources" headlined by this damning quote from his high school coach:

"He was told in the spring (by the Georgia Tech staff) that he was going to play quarterback," Southwest coach Scott Schwarzer said Tuesday. "When he visited a few weeks ago they told him he was playing receiver."

If this is true, it wouldn't be the first time Johnson and company have lied to a recruit. A month ago, we highlighted a Colorado Springs Gazette piece which documented the negative recruiting and lies sold to recruits by the Navy coaching staff in Paul Johnson's final season at the Academy. This also makes you wonder, for instance, what kind of bunk Johnson has been filling in the head of a young man like Vad Lee, who has openly tweeted his intentions of being the first ever triple-option QB to be drafted in the first round(of the NFL draft, not the CFL, presumably).

Upon being awakened to the truth, Willis was surely met face-to-face with the prospect of being a "2nd receiver," if he was lucky, sentenced to a career of cut-blocking and catching 5 passes a year in the Cheese Ball Offense. He thus chose instead to try his hand at slot receiver in a more balanced attack at lowly Wake Forest. This illustrates yet another profound difficulty in recruiting for Johnson's offense-- while he may be able to advertise the successes of a supremely-gifted #1 receiver like Demaryius Thomas, it will be prohibitively difficult for him to obtain more than one halfway-decent receiving prospect at a time. This means Tech must generally place all its eggs in a single basket at the position, and if that one player turns out to be a dud(a la Stephen Hill), then there is no one else available who is talented enough to develop into a legitimate major league receiving threat.

But has the story been written or will there be further "surprises" as we approach recruiting's biggest day? As Stinktalk poster gtzulu asked, will "NSD" stand for "Now they Stop Decommitting"? Certainly Coach Johnson's bungling must have even the most die-hard of flunkies questioning all they thought they knew about the mechanics of college football recruiting.

Tuitt switches amidst dubious circumstances

Coach Johnson scored an enormous get on Tuesday as 5-Star DE Stephon Tuitt out of Monroe switched his verbal commitment from Notre Dame to Georgia Tech. Tuitt is one of the top players at his position nationally and would represent the FIRST player of the recruiting season that Tech has successfully acquired who has also possessed an offer from UGA. It should be added however that UGA, for whatever reason, was eliminated from Tuitt's radar early in his recruitment, and did not finish among his top choices.

We mentioned the possibility of Tuitt's decision on Sunday, when Johnson obtained the commitment of his Monroe High School teammate and reported best friend Demontevious Smith, an "under-the-radar" prospect who held mostly mid-major and FCS offers. Suspiciously enough, Smith did not possess a Georgia Tech offer before last weekend, when both he and Tuitt were scheduled to visit. This brings into question the ethics of Johnson in potentially offering a scrub player who he fully intends to warm the bench simply to obtain the services of a more highly-prized associate. In fact it makes you wonder how long Demontevious will even remain on the Tech roster now that he has outlived his "usefulness."

Furthermore, Tuitt is yet another previously-committed player which Johnson has attempted to steal away, despite his reported disdain for players who shop around after committing to Tech. As we've pointed out again and again, Johnson's "excuse" for this hypocritical behavior is that he turns the other way in such a circumstance and does not bother to inform himself of the player's "arrangement" with the other school, so it's somehow "not his problem." You would think though that if only Coach Johnson would have asked Notre Dame, they would have been more than forthcoming about how unhappy they would have been with his encroaching on their committed recruit.

Of course the party has already begun for Coach Johnson's toadies. While they are the first to bash the "star system" of the recruiting sites when Johnson is mopping up two and three star leftovers, they become positively giddy whenever a rare 4 or 5 star player of note deems it practical to choose Tech. The truth is, these purveyors of The Johnson Problem would have found reasons to feel good about themselves regardless of the player's rating. If he's a 5-star, well, all hail Scout and Rivals! If he's a 2-star, don't listen to Scout or Rivals... look at this tape of him dominating in a high school game! Either way, you end up with the same oblivious euphoria.

Tuitt is certainly reason for celebration for the rational Tech fan-- he would be our first 5-star commit since Calvin Johnson pledged to Chan Gailey in 2004. Though we have misgivings about the way he obtained the commitment, kudos to Coach Johnson for finally securing a prospect fans can get excited about. Now if he could only do it on a more consistent basis, and without all the Sun Belt filler, this program might actually start going places.

Johnson's recruiting tactics exposed?

"Our Staff does not negative recruit (...) Paul Johnson has stated it several times." - gt23eric, Stingtalk insider

The Colorado Springs Gazette Saturday published a fascinating story on the assemblage of Troy Calhoun's first recruiting class at the Air Force Academy in 2007. It goes without saying that the service academies often find themselves in pursuit of many of the same athletes, and Calhoun had quite a yarn to tell about two he courted while Paul Johnson was still head coach at the Naval Academy. Recruits Paul Weatheroy and Tim Jefferson were targeted by both Navy and Air Force at the time, and Calhoun's recollection of their respective recruitments is an eye-opener for those Tech fans who would continue to promote the myth of Paul Johnson's sanctity.

On Weatheroy's recruitment:

"On a recruiting trip to another service academy, [Weatheroy's father] said that school spoke negatively about Air Force. He said the coaches claimed the Falcons were going to use [his son] as a fullback, that Calhoun had lied about him being their top tailback recruit, that Calhoun was going to run a pro-style offense. [Air Force assistant Charlton] Warren said he heard other schools showed recruits film of the NFL’s Broncos and Texans, to convince them that would be Calhoun’s offense at Air Force."

Neither Navy nor Paul Johnson are specifically mentioned, but the dots are easily connected. At the time, Army ran a pro-style offense itself, leaving Navy as the only other service academy of the option mold. If "another service academy" negatively recruited against Air Force by suggesting it would run a pro-style attack, then that would isolate Paul Johnson and Navy as the only possible source of such disinformation.

The article continues on the recruitment of QB Tim Jefferson:

"More negative recruiting was happening on the other side of the country with Jefferson. Jefferson had told Air Force he was coming, but he wasn’t so sure now that he was hearing Calhoun wouldn’t run the option. Jefferson said his commitment wavered for about two weeks. During that time Jefferson said he told Navy he would go there. Jefferson’s father and high school coach wanted him to go to Annapolis, because there was no uncertainty about that staff."

Again, a competing school "on the other side of the country" negatively recruited against Air Force on the basis that it would not be utilizing the option. Furthermore, the school Jefferson had "wavered" in the direction of "for about two weeks" was none other than the Naval Academy. There is frankly no way then that the "negative recruiting" mentioned could NOT have been emanating from the forked tongues of Coach Paul Johnson and his henchmen in Annapolis.

Don't get us wrong. It's not that we see anything particularly wrong with certain kinds of negative recruiting-- it's all part of the game, and has been for decades. But it certainly casts a darker pallor upon Coach Johnson than the pearly-white gleam championed by your average Georgia Tech football Kool Aid slurper. And if insider gt23eric's statement on Johnson's explicit denial of negative recruiting is true, then it is yet another example of the selfish, lumbering hypocrisy practiced by that oh-so-blessed purveyor of the highest integrity, so perfect for Georgia Tech, Coach Paul Johnson.