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.

The Perfect (fallback) Option

We saw what Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly did when one of his top commits visited Georgia Tech and changed allegiances. With a front-row seat to the carnage, did Paul Johnson take notes on the methodology used by a superior football coach? Did Paul Johnson learn and grow from his latest disastrous failure?

Of course he didn't. That would be most unbecoming of a football "genius."

DE commit looking elsewhere? WWCPJD?

Per Rivals.com, Georgia Tech DE commit Darrius Caldwell is currently on a surprise official visit this weekend to the University of Illinois. This has been reconfirmed by insiders on the Illinois Scout board.

Will the man of "character and commitment" Coach Paul Johnson now IMMEDIATELY pull Caldwell's scholarship as he did with 2009 QB recruit Dontae Aycock? In case you've forgotten, here are a few tidbits regarding what "commitment" supposedly meant to Johnson at the time.

If Tech loses Caldwell, it would be a stunning blow following the drama of Stephon Tuitt earlier this week. Caldwell is rated a 5.7 and ranked the 23rd best DE recruit in the country according to Rivals. He has been committed to Tech since mid-August and could possibly be the second DE prospect to decommit in the last week. His loss would be disastrous to what has already been a thoroughly disappointing class.

With QB commit Vad Lee's intentions of visiting other schools apparently finished, this development may finally provide the insight many Tech fans have been seeking into the truth behind the facade of "high character" and "morality" which has been so finely constructed by Johnson and his boot-licking supporters.

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.

Changes need to be made

Though this blog is titled "Fire Paul Johnson," we realize that, because of the ludicrous and reactionary contract extension afforded Johnson following the 2008 season, he will be given every opportunity to fix the mess he has created. Since we are not averse to pitching in and doing our part, here are some changes which we feel are necessary to make the current regime more palatable until a few more years can be eaten away from the buyout:

Surprise! Johnson still has all the answers

Coach Paul Johnson put a bow-tie on Georgia Tech's most miserable season in 14 years at his annual end-of-season press conference on Friday. As with all of Johnson's reluctant interactions with the unwashed public, smugness, pomposity, and clichés dominated the proceedings. Here are some of the more salient quotations, coupled with our astute expert analysis:

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.

The meaning of commitment

According to preliminary indications from a HIVe insider, Coach Paul Johnson may be backing down from the "Aycock Rule" in the circumstance of 2011 commit Vad Lee. And predictably the same toadies who waxed poetic about Johnson's "principles" and all those high-character kids he was recruiting are now the same ones laying the groundwork of excuses. Among the early candidates:

• The Aycock affair happened later in the process.
  
  
• Aycock was dishonest with the coaches about his visit to Auburn.(though it's been established that he told the coaches about the Auburn visit and was instructed not to go)
  
  
• Johnson and Lee have some kind of special "agreement" that allows him to take visits.(If that's the case, isn't that a little unfair to the rest of the recruits?)
  
  
• Tech stopped recruiting another QB as a result of Aycock's commitment.(that doesn't apply in Lee's case??)
  
  
• Aycock had some kind of "character flaw" that Lee does not have.
  
  
• The AJC writer reporting on Lee's wavering is a UGA grad and is thus stirring things up against GT.
  
  
• There never was a "policy" to begin with. And Oceania has never been at war with Eastasia.
  
  

In case you're new to the situation, here is a refresher on what "commitment" (apparently) means to Coach Paul Johnson:

“We tell kids all the time in our office ‘Look around and make sure this is what you want to do,’” Johnson said. “I am not trying to keep kids from looking around. I think they need to look around. But when you decide and commit, then you’re giving people your word that you’re coming. It’s not a game. It’s not ‘Ok, I’ll take this one unless I can find something better. Or let me lock this down there so I can shop around for some other spots.’ If you’re doing that, you’re not committing.”

“Commitment to me means if they tell me they are coming, then I expect that they are coming. If they tell you you’re coming, then why are they taking more visits?”

“I view anybody that’s still visiting [other] schools as not committed. That’s just me. That’s just the way I do it.”

“... Dontae would tell you that I made him call Lousville and tell them that he wasn’t coming. I told him that’s only fair to Louisville. He went [the following day] and did that. There was a lot more to it. Then he got some bad advice. And maybe not. Maybe he wanted to go to Auburn anyways. That’s what I took it as. If he wanted to visit Auburn, then he wanted to go there.”

More on this situation as it develops.

Don't get on that plane!

On November 29th, 2010, the worlds of cubicle-dwelling middle-aged men throughout the southeast were thrown into a tempest when their creepy voyeurism of a seventeen-year-old kid unearthed the following chestnut on his Twitter account:

"I continue to pray about my early decision although others are starting to make a stronger argument"

That phrase was dispensed by none other than Durham, NC QB and 2011 Georgia Tech commit Vad Lee, a player who some would suggest is the Crown Jewel of what has been an underwhelming class for Coach Paul Johnson. The proceedings quickly invoked memories of Dontae Aycock, another Johnson QB recruit who committed to Tech in 2009 but had his offer revoked after subsequently catching a fateful plane ride to Auburn. The AJC has in fact confirmed that Lee "may" take visits to competing schools.