The Memphis Tigers football team will begin spring practice on Wednesday, Feb. 22, at the Murphy Athletic Complex. There will be 15 practices during the spring session, which will run from February 22 – April 4.

Head coach Justin Fuente has opened the first two practices to Tiger fans. The open practices on Wednesday, February 22, and Friday, February 24, will begin at approximately 4 PM Central time.

Fans are asked to park in the paved lots directly behind FedExPark, and are asked to not park on the drive leading to the fields as that is designated as an emergency vehicle lane.

Tiger fans are asked to not stand in the area between the fields during practice for safety reasons. If weather forces the Tigers to the turf field, fans should park in the paved lot behind FedExPark closest to the leftfield line and walk through the baseball entrance, through the turfroom and out to the field from the door between the two weight rooms. There will be Tiger baseball games beginning at 4 p.m. on both Wednesday and Friday, and Tiger fans are invited to stop on over at FedExPark and catch a few innings of baseball. There will be no admission charge for baseball on those two days.

Those attending football practice on the two open days are asked to not take any photographs or videos during practice.

Practice updates, as well as video interviews with select players and Coach Fuente, will be available throughout the spring.

The Blue-Gray Game, which is free and open to the public, is slated for 12 p.m., on Saturday, March 31, at Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium.

Defensive back Ryan Thompson is one of six junior college transfers currently enrolled in spring semester classes. The 5-10, 186-pound junior will participate in spring practice for Indiana University, which begins on March 3.

Thompson spent two years at defensive back for head coach Jon Williams at Itawamba Community College in Fulton, Miss.

He collected 44 tackles, four tackles for loss, three interceptions, three pass breakups and one fumble recovery in 2011. As a freshman, Thompson netted 21 stops, two TFLs and one fumble recovery.

Thompson starred for head coach Mickey Mapp at Pontotoc (Miss.) High School. The four-year football, soccer and track letterwinner earned football all-division accolades.

Fred Tate, who previously coached with newly named defensive coordinator Art Kaufman at Southern Miss, has been named defensive line coach at Texas Tech University.

Tate replaces Terry Price who left to Texas Tech to return to his alma mater, Texas A&M.

“We are happy to welcome Fred Tate to our football family,” said head coach Tommy Tuberville. “Fred is an excellent coach and Art Kaufman really spoke high of him from their time together at Southern Miss. He will bring a lot of experience to our defensive unit and we are thrilled to have him.”

Tate comes to Texas Tech after spending the last two seasons as the safeties coach at Marshall University (Conference USA). Prior to his time at Marshall, he spent time as the defensive line coach at both Tennessee-Chattanooga and Southern Miss.

While at Southern Miss, one of his Golden Eagle defenders, Tom Johnson, earned All-Conference USA honors in 2005. USM finished 7-5 in 2005 and 9-5 in 2006. The 2005 squad was New Orleans Bowl Champions with a 31-19 victory over Arkansas State. The 2006 Eagles claimed the Conference USA East Division title, played Houston in the C-USA Championship Game and defeated Ohio University 28-7 in the GMAC Bowl.

Tate’s coaching career began in 1997 at East Central Community College in Mississippi where he coached tight ends and receivers. He moved to Jacksonville State in 1998 and served as the defensive line and special teams coach for two years. While with the Gamecocks, he mentored Mark Word who played in the National Football League for the Kansas City Chiefs and the Cleveland Browns.

The 2000 season saw him return to the junior college level, coaching the defensive line, punting and kicking teams at East Mississippi Community College. He served as the defensive line coach at Southwest Texas State in 2001 and at Middle Tennessee in 2002. At Southwest Texas, he guided Clenton Ballard to All-America status.

Ballard went on to play in the NFL for the Jacksonville Jaguars and the San Diego Chargers.

Tate joined former Southern Mississippi defensive coordinator John Thompson at East Carolina in 2003. He coached the Pirates’ outside linebackers for two years and assisted with special teams.

A native of Hattiesburg, Miss., Tate enlisted in the United States Army upon high school graduation. He served five years as a combat engineer in the U.S. Army Airborne.

Following his service, Tate attended East Central Community College in Decatur, Miss., where he was a JC Gridwire All-America selection as a sophomore and was voted the Most Valuable Offensive Player of the National Junior College All-Star Game.

His playing career continued at Southern Mississippi, playing defensive end and tackle in 1995 and 1996 for Coach Bower. The Golden Eagles were charter members of Conference USA in 1996 and won the league’s first football championship that season with a 4-1 mark. The 8-3 overall record included a victory over Georgia and a seven-game winning streak.

Tate earned his bachelor’s degree from Southern Miss in 1997.

Tate’s hiring will not be considered official until the university has received a state-mandated background check.

The Joe Paterno I knew best was still a relatively young man in his 30s or 40s, 20 years before he became the Penn State and college football icon we know today.

I was reporting part-time about Penn State football, and Joe was making the transition from a loyal assistant and offensive guru under Rip Engle to head coach, reconstructing the team with his own philosophy and innovations.

Beginning in the early 1960s, it became apparent that Paterno would eventually succeed his mentor, and just about all of the older and more experienced assistants under Engle were for it. It may be difficult to believe these days, but the coaching staffs in the 1950s and 1960s were truly like a family. They were not only with each other in meetings and on the field, but they socialized together after hours, too.

One of my favorite photographs in the Penn State All-Sports Museum is near the exit of the first-floor exhibits. It goes back to a late winter afternoon of the 1950s outside the Allenberry Playhouse near Harrisburg. All the coaches and their wives were there except J.T. White and his wife, who were late when the photo had to be taken in the fading sunlight.

On the far left is young Joe Paterno, still a bachelor. This was one of Joe’s favorite photos, too, as it was one of only a few on the wall in his expansive Lasch Building office.

A visit to Allenberry was an annual affair for the coaches, and in 1959 Engle also started a weekly tradition of gathering the coaches and their wives for cocktails and dinner after the final practice on the Thursday before a game.

A different coach would host the cocktails at his house, and then they would go to dinner, almost always at the Tavern Restaurant. One time before he married, Joe held the cocktail party at his place, a small bedroom in the home of assistant coach Jim O’Hora. Joe lived there for many years.

“We squeezed 15 people into the bedroom for a one-hour cocktail party,” Penn State’s first linebacker coach Dan Radakovich told me recently. “That was truly a unique experience.”

As head coach, Joe continued that Thursday night tradition into the 1970s, but as the coaching staff changed and his longtime assistants retired, those weekly dinners ended. That probably marked the end of an era in Joe’s career, too, for it was about that time that the candid, hotshot football coach was becoming a major national figure.

I first met Joe in that “family” stage in 1955 when I was a freshman writing for the Daily Collegian. All of the assistants were friendly with the Collegian kids, and Joe was one of the most popular.

As I write about it now, I think we were almost part of the family. The newspaper and the college were much smaller then, and the goal of the sportswriters was to become the sports editor as a senior and cover the football team.

Sometimes we even traveled with the team on longer road trips, and for a while some sports editors even received a letterman’s jacket at the end of the season. It’s not that we didn’t give critical opinions when we saw something we didn’t like, but we did it in a more benign way. It was a different, less contentious style of journalism that thrived for decades but has long since evolved into the adversarial, instantaneous, 24-hour, Twitter, ESPN maelstrom of today.

Two years after graduation and a stint in the Navy, I went to work for The Associated Press in Pittsburgh. There, I began seeing Joe again at a weekly Tuesday college football media luncheon during the season. Penn State, Pitt and West Virginia would send their sports information directors and the head coach or an assistant, and sometimes that was Joe. He was still the same Joe, greeting me with that smile on his face and a sharp wisecrack of years past.

Over the next five years, I wrote many stories about Penn State football, first for the AP and then as a freelancer for a new newspaper called Pittsburgh Weekly Sports, co-founded by Beano Cook, then Pitt’s sports information director.

On Thursday, Feb. 17, 1966, Pittsburgh sportscaster Tom Bender, the play-by-play man for the football radio network, broke the story on KDKA-TV’s 11 o’clock newscast that Rip Engle would retire the next day and Joe Paterno would probably succeed him.

During a news conference the following Saturday, Joe was named head coach.

At that time I was working in Harrisburg, but in late August I was back in Pittsburgh working in the newsroom of WIIC-TV. A few days after returning, Bender asked me if I would be his new spotter on Penn State broadcasts. We had known each other since my AP days, and he had learned of my spotting experience as an undergraduate.

On Sept. 17, 1966, I walked into the small booth at Beaver Stadium and met a co-analyst who also had just been hired, a Lewistown sportscaster named Fran Fisher. I certainly didn’t envision that Fran would one day be a close friend. Nor did either of us know that Fran would soon become part of Joe’s three-man team, along with Penn State’s sports information director Jim Tarman, that would change Penn State football forever with their marketing innovations.

Before the 1967 season, I convinced my boss that our television station should concentrate on covering Penn State games since our rivals in Pittsburgh were heavily invested in Pitt.

That began a three-year odyssey that added television reporting about Penn State football to my spotting along with freelance writing. But what I did for television then was the dark ages compared to the omnipotent massive media coverage of today.

On game days, my cameraman would film the game, and then we would interview Joe and players on the field and in the locker room near where the Lasch Building is today. We’d do enough interviews to carry us through the week. We’d drive the film back to Pittsburgh and process it, usually in time to use some video on the 11 o’clock news. Before the season, we’d go up to State College a couple times and interview Joe and the players and use that material over a few days.

All through this period, Joe never changed. Wisecracking and teasing. Up front and honest. Still treating me like an old friend, but no longer like a student. Truly like equals.?Almost still part of the family.

The last game I covered was at Pitt in 1969. We looked a lot alike back then, and I was often mistaken for his brother. So, after my postgame interview, I asked him to pretend he was me doing the interview and I was him. He did, and it was a blast. We used it on the air that night and people couldn’t believe it.

After that, I moved to the Midwest, and for the next few years I covered four Penn State bowl games as a freelancer. But after 1976 I simply was a fan, mostly via television because I saw only one home game from 1970 until 1983. I’d see Joe occasionally on the road or trade letters with him, and he was always the same.

I think our relationship can best be summed up by the autograph he left for me in his autobiography, “Paterno by the Book.” I had helped arrange for Joe to participate in a major National Press Club sports forum featuring Howard Cosell as moderator in the spring of 1990. Joe was flying in from Detroit after a testimonial dinner for Michigan’s Bo Schembechler. He was early and said we should get a cup of coffee at the airport before going to the Press Club.

We sat there for more than half an hour talking about a lot of things. Joe told me about the Schembechler dinner, brought me up to date about the team and asked about my family as we reminisced about the old days. No one recognized him, which is hard to imagine today.

Just before we left the coffee shop, Joe signed the book. Truly, a few tears are coming to my eyes as I type this. Here’s what he wrote:

“To Lou, I hope this brings back some memories – We were young once. Fondly, Joe Paterno.”

Lou Prato is a historian for Penn State University.

Davonte Neal, ranked No. 8 overall in the ESPNU 150, ended up committing to Notre Dame over Arizona, Arkansas and North Carolina on Tuesday from his former elementary school, Kyrene de la Esperanza.

However, Neal’s decision came hours after he didn’t show up to his originally-scheduled announcement, which was attended by 600 elementary school children, friends and family. After waiting approximately 30 minutes, the morning assembly ended.

Neal, the top-rated athlete in the nation and last unsigned member of the ESPNU 150, will inject another dose of star power into coach Brian Kelly‘s third class of recruits.

At 5-foot-10 and 175 pounds, Neal played receiver in the Under Armour All-America Game, though he was picked for the event as a defensive back. As a senior, the two-time Arizona Gatorade Player of the Year scored 30 touchdowns on offense, added three on special teams and starred in the secondary with 12 pass breakups. He finished as the No. 8 overall prospect nationally.

He extended his recruiting by taking a visit to Arizona after signing day and also made trips to Arkansas, Ohio State, Notre Dame and North Carolina.

This class for the Irish, with the addition of Neal, is now ranked ninth nationally by ESPN and features five other members of the ESPNU 150, headlined by No. 3-rated quarterback Gunner Kiel of Columbus, Ind. Neal is the lone five-star prospect in the group.

Saturday was a big day for Crestview’s rising senior defensive end/outside linebacker Dillan Lawson.

Lawson, who was in Gainesville at the University of Florida football team’s Junior Day, committed to play football for the Gators and will sign a national letter of intent next February.

The ironic thing is at one time Lawson, who is the first player in Crestview history to have a chance to play in the SEC, admits that he really didn’t even like the Gators.

“I really didn’t have a lot of interest in the Gators because I was in Alabama and I thought the Gators were cocky,” he said. “I went out on their campus and met all the coaches and talked to some of the players on the team and I saw the weight room and the nutrition program and everything and I liked it. And I like the fit for me.”

The 6-foot-4, 215-pound Lawson runs the 40-yard dash in 4.5 seconds and is ranked the No. 351 recruit in the country and No. 51 in Florida by 247Sports. They also list him as 3-star prospect and the No. 27 outside linebacker in the country.

Bulldog coach Kevin Pettis couldn’t be happier for Lawson or the Bulldog Nation.

“I think it’s big having a SEC commit,” Pettis said. “It’s big for Dillan because now all he has to do is relax and play and get his grades so the pressure is kind of off of him.

“I’m a big proponent of kids staying in state. I like kids playing where they grew up and where they will probably spend the rest of their lives.”

Lawson said the Gator coach staff has told him that he will be expected to do many of the same things he does for the Bulldog defense.

“Coach (Will) Muschamp (Florida’s head coach) said I have the body and size for a defensive end and also an outside linebacker,” Lawson said. “They are going to want me to rush the passer.”

Pettis explained what the Gator coaches see in Lawson.

“I think he’s a ranging kid,” Pettis said. “He’s got those long arms and good speed. His weight room numbers are phenomenal.

“He’s just a good kid and I think what makes him an SEC player is you can’t coach what he’s got. You can’t coach 6-4 and runs a 4.5. There are a lot of things he can he do.”

Now that Lawson has made his decision he hopes to be able to help some of his Crestview teammates as they go through the recruiting process.

“With me going to a big school like that I’m going to try and bring as much publicity to the school as I can to help me teammates out,” he said. “I just don’t want to be selfish. I’m going to try to get them there too.

“I don’t want to be the only one from my school at Florida. I want other players from my team to be there with me.”

Randy Dickson is the sports editor for the Crestview Bulletin.

The Auburn Tigers football team will hit the field in one month for the start of spring practice. In less than two months, the Tigers will open Jordan-Hare Stadium for their annual A-Day Game.

Auburn will begin spring practice on March 21st. The Tigers will practice 15 times this spring, culminating in the A-Day Game on April 21st.

This will be a big spring for the Tigers, as the team begins to break in two new coordinators, in newly-hired defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder and offensive coordinator Scott Loeffler.

Auburn will also search for a new starting quarterback for the fifth straight spring. Barrett Trotter won the job last spring, but left the team at the end of last season with one year of eligibility remaining.

Clint Moseley and Kiehl Frazier both have experience. They’ll compete with incoming freshman Zeke Pike for the starting job, beginning on March 21st.

The Arizona State University football team will host a free Sun Devil Football Youth Experience Clinic on Saturday, March 31 at Sun Devil Stadium at 11:30 AM local time, head coach Todd Graham has announced.

The free youth clinic will be open to both boys and girls ages 8-13 who are not enrolled in 9th grade or above. The clinic is entirely free of charge and open to the first 500 youth to register.

The clinic will feature members of the Sun Devil coaching staff and current players on the roster and will focus on several drills and fundamentals including: form tackling, ball skills, running and blocking.

Registrants are required to fill out the registration form found in the PDF at the top of this page as well as complete the waiver and medical treatment release form that is also found above. Both must be filled out and returned either by mail, email or fax to Jill Adams, whose contact information is located on the registration form. Pre-registration is required and registration will not be accepted on site on the day of the event. Registration is due by 5 p.m. on March 29.

Space is limited and only the first 500 youth to register will be enrolled in the clinic. Those attending are required to wear tennis shoes or rubber-soled shoes and encouraged to wear sweats/sweatpants and a t-shirt or sweatshirt, preferably representing Arizona State University. Participants will not wear helmets or shoulder pads and are asked not to wear other college apparel outside of Arizona State’s.

Those who arrive early to the clinic will also have an opportunity to see the Sun Devil football team at practice. Practice starts at 9 a.m. and is open to participants and their parents or guardians as well as the youth coaches in attendance.

Check-in for the clinic will take place from 10 to 11 a.m. and parents and guardians must stay on the premises until the conclusion of the clinic. Instructions for the clinic will begin at 11:15 a.m. with the clinic itself running from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

Those with any further questions should contact Jill Adams at 480-965-3037. In case of inclement weather, the clinic will be rescheduled to a later date. For more information on Sun Devil football camps, visit www.thesundevils.com.

The Houston Cougars will host walk-on tryouts during the spring semester and current University of Houston students in good academic standing must attend a 3 p.m. NCAA compliance meeting on Feb. 21 in order to participate.

The meeting will be held in the Carl Lewis Auditorium of the Athletics Alumni Center and students must be enrolled in a minimum of 12 hours to be eligible for participation. In addition, students must have a valid sports physical (not more than one year old) and be able to provide proof of health insurance.

For more information or to register for this mandatory NCAA compliance meeting, please contact Joe Alcoser at jalcoser@uh.edu.

Clemson has long prided itself as a potential national power, even though its ACC title last year was its first since 1991.

Now the Tigers are backing up their big talk with big bucks.

Just as rumors began circulating last December that Urban Meyer was interested in bringing Tigers offensive coordinator Chad Morris to Ohio State, Clemson gave Morris a pay raise that awarded him a reported annual salary of $1.3 million, making him the nation’s highest-paid offensive coordinator.

Clemson hasn’t stopped spending since.

After they suffered an embarrassing 70-33 loss to West Virginia in the Orange Bowl, the Tigers parted ways with defensive coordinator Kevin Steele and hired Brent Venables by paying him a reported $800,000 per year, about $300,000 more than he received last year for doing the same job at Oklahoma.

If that weren’t enough, Clemson officials announced just this week that seven more assistant coaches and head strength coach Joey Batson would receive a combined total of $450,000 in raises. Clemson is expected to pay its nine full-time assistants a total of $4.2 million next season, a figure that moves up to $4.4 million once Batson’s salary is added.

“It’s important to me that we have a staff that’s competitive with everybody out there in the country because our goal is to be the best,” Swinney said. “It’s as simple as that. I’m not interested in just being the best in the ACC. We did that this year. I want to be the best in the country. That’s the arena I want to play in, and that’s how we have to invest if we’re going to get there.”

There’s plenty of evidence that spending big money on assistant coaches can have an impact on the field. USA Today published the 2011 salaries for assistant coaches at 97 of the 120 FBS programs and revealed that six of those schools paid over $3 million to their assistants. Two of those six schools – Alabama and LSU – faced off in the BCS championship game.

Swinney believes investing heavily in assistants also can pay off on the recruiting trail.

“It gives you even more credibility from a recruiting standpoint, that not only we can recruit the best players here to Clemson,” Swinney said. “We [also] can recruit the best coaches – and keep the best coaches. That’s exciting.”

It’s too early to tell whether Clemson’s ability to keep Morris and add Venables actually has helped the Tigers attract recruits.

Nineteen of the 20 players in Clemson’s 2012 recruiting class verbally committed by mid-October. They had made up their minds long before Venables arrived at Clemson or Morris received his raise.

Many of the 2013 prospects are too early in their college selection process to worry about coaching moves that schools have made in the offseason. Charlotte (N.C.) Vance linebacker Larenz Bryant visited Clemson two weeks ago and has interest in playing there, but he said the Tigers’ big investment in assistants probably wouldn’t influence his college choice.

“No, sir,” said Bryant, the No. 95 overall prospect in the 2013 class. “It’s about my major and my feeling about the school.”

Other 2013 recruits have a different take.

Matthews (N.C.) Butler linebacker Peter Kalambayi said he had communicated with Venables when the coach was still working at Oklahoma. Kalambayi, the No. 62 prospect in the 2013 class, was surprised Clemson lured Venables away from the Sooners.

“It has a pretty big impact,” said Kalambayi, who remains uncommitted. “You want to get coached by the best guys.”

Prospects also want to have some familiarity with their future coaches.

For example, Lawrenceville (Ga.) Central Gwinnett linebacker Trey Johnson attends the same high school that produced former Auburn defensive coordinator Ted Roof. Just about every day, Johnson can see Roof’s picture in the Central Gwinnett locker room.

Johnson, the No. 36 overall 2013 recruit, verbally committed to Auburn after establishing a bond with Roof. When Roof left Auburn at the end of the regular season for UCF (Penn State would hire him away from UCF a month later), Johnson began to rethink his decision.

Auburn probably needed to make a splash in selecting Roof’s replacement. That’s exactly what Gene Chizik did by hiring Atlanta Falcons defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder.

“It all depended on who they brought in,” said Johnson, who stayed committed to Auburn. “I really wanted to see who it was they brought in. When they brought in Coach VanGorder from the Falcons, since I live in Atlanta, I’ve seen him on TV a bunch of times. Bringing him in was pretty good.”

VanGorder made the move from the NFL back to college for a multiyear deal worth reportedly $850,000 annually, $350,000 more than Roof earned last season.

This isn’t the first time Auburn has spent big money on a coordinator.

Gus Malzahn received $1.3 million as Auburn’s offensive coordinator last year after rejecting overtures to become Vanderbilt’s head coach. Malzahn still left at the end of the 2011 season to take over Arkansas State’s program. The combined salaries of Auburn’s assistants last year were the highest of any team included in the USA Today report, which estimated their total at just below $4.2 million.

The seven-figure salaries that Malzahn received last year and Morris will earn this season underscore the importance of hanging on to top assistants. No matter how much recruits are told to pick a school based on its own merits since coaches could come and go at any time, all too often they make their selection because of a rapport they’ve established with a particular coach.

“Ninety-nine percent of the kids across the country, when they pick a school, they’re picking because of the assistant coach who’s recruiting them and the head coach who comes to sit down with their family at the end of the day,” Louisville defensive line coach and recruiting coordinator Clint Hurtt said. “If people want to believe it has something to do with the school, that’s the furthest thing from the truth. If a kid loves the school, he loves the school for the past football players who have played at that university and that won a lot of games and that had a lot of success. And that comes back to the relationship with the coaches.

“There are a lot of things that get said in the game in terms of, ‘I picked this school because they have a great business school.’ Let me tell you something, one of every 100 kids you recruit, they really mean that when they say it. What it really comes down to is the quality of the football program, how much are they going to play and what their impact could be if they decide to go to school there and the relationship with the coaching staff and how they’re going to be utilized. That’s the 100 percent truth.”

One look at the Pac-12 drives that point home.

California was on the verge of attracting its most star-studded recruiting class in school history before defensive line coach Tosh Lupoi – the 2010 Rivals.com National Recruiter of the Year – left for a similar position at Washington two weeks before National Signing Day. Lupoi reportedly had made $164,000 annually at California and will receive $416,000 per season at Washington.

After Lupoi’s departure, a California class that seemed on track to rank in the top 10 nationally finished 23rd overall and sixth in the Pac-12. The Golden Bears had made headlines during the Army All-America Bowl when five-star safety Shaq Thompson, five-star defensive tackle Ellis McCarthy and Rivals100 receiver Jordan Payton verbally committed to California. All three ended up signing with Pac-12 rivals – McCarthy and Payton at UCLA and Thompson at Washington.

“It was such a big deal, so close to Signing Day and the guy flipped for so much more money,” said Mike Farrell, the national recruiting analyst for Rivals.com. “I think that will probably start a little bit of a trend and a bidding war for some of these guys, but Lupoi was a special situation. He’s probably the best recruiter/assistant coach in the country over the last three years.”

There might not be many other Lupois out there, but that won’t stop schools from spending heavily on assistant coaches. The USA Today report noted that the average salary for an FBS assistant coach in 2011 was $182,000, an increase of almost 11 percent from the previous year.

Swinney understood the value of a quality assistant before he even began his head coaching career.

When Clemson named him the school’s permanent head coach in the winter of 2008 – after he served as interim coach the second half of the 2008 season – Swinney signed an incentive-based contract that guaranteed him only $800,000 per year. The deal made him one of the lowest-paid head coaches in the ACC at the time, but Swinney was fine with that because it allowed the school to spend more money on the rest of his staff.

Clemson’s ACC title helped provide a significant raise for Swinney, who is expected to earn $1.9 million this year. But he continues to believe in spreading the wealth to his assistants. Remember the $450,000 in raises that eight Clemson staff members were given this week? Well, $265,000 of that total came from Swinney, who reassigned a bonus he had received for leading Clemson to the ACC title and reaching other incentives.

“We don’t have limitless resources here,” Swinney said. “For me, in building this program for the long term, I’ve chosen to take less and invest in my staff along with the administration. It’s my commitment to this university, it’s my commitment to this staff along with the administration. From a long-term standpoint, that’s the best way to go. Eventually it will all work out for everybody.”

Now he hopes recruits are taking notice.

Steve Megargee is a national writer for Rivals.com.