The Athletic is a premium subscription site, so I will not link the entire article they have today on cheating in recruiting. But if you are a subscriber, I would recommend that you read it.
In the article, they talked to anonymous coaches from each conference. I am going to list below some of the comments from the SEC coaches when asked if they come across cheating in recruiting:
SEC-1: “I’m in the Southeastern Conference. I see cheating all the ****ing time.”
SEC-3: “You hear about it frequently, in our conference anyways.”
SEC-1: “We’ve had handlers that come into our building, walk into my office and say, ‘You can have this player, but it’ll cost you blank.’ We tell them, ‘No, thank you. We’re not interested.’ And then those kids go to one of three schools in our conference every time. I have no interest in it because here’s the thing — if they cheat with you, they’ll cheat on you. And so if we enter into that situation when we had that happen, then when push comes to shove, and we need to be tough on them, they own you.”
SEC-1: “We’re not worried about them finding out it was us or anything. The league and the NCAA are gonna tell us the same thing: Without evidence, we can’t do anything. Because remember, the league and the NCAA, they have no jurisdiction to investigate. They can’t issue search warrants and payments. So it’s just that a ‘He said, she said’ thing.”
What it the old joke about coaching in the SEC - "If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying"
