By Paul M. Banks
So this is why those SEC always teams end up with the biggest, fastest and strongest recruits. A great quote from a New York Times article this week reports on the University of Tennessee’s student hostess program, and the way members of the school’s Orange Pride group treat potential recruits when they visit the Knoxville campus.
Keith Easterwood, a veteran summer basketball coach, said that on a visit last year with his son, a football recruit, he had to ask a hostess to stop brushing her breasts against both him and his son.
He recalled saying, “Young lady, if you don’t stop doing that, we’ve got a problem.” Easterwood said that he took a group of basketball players to a Western Kentucky football game at Tennessee this year, and that the presence of the hostesses had his players “literally reduced to blubbering idiots.” “I’ve been up there five times, four for football and one basketball visit,”
“My observation is that this is a very organized operation. These girls have obviously been groomed. There’s a lot of eye contact and touching.” Easterwood said.
What this says, and even what it implies, probably doesn’t shock you. Ever since the University of Colorado’s “prostitution slush fund” became public knowledge, we’ve all kind of tacitly and cynically understood what we think goes on under the revenue producing college sports table. But this provocative quote is unique in that it’s related to a smoking gun.
The Vols are supposedly taking their hottie hired hands and (in a blatant violation of NCAA rules) sending them out to the recruits themselves (allegedly) instead of just schmoozing the recruits while they’re present on campus. And a photograph recently published in SI is the aforementioned smoking gun. See the NY Times article or Larry Brown Sports for more.