Does success breed jealousy in football recruiting?

In a recent article from the Salt Lake Tribune (Click here for the article), the paper takes a look at the recruiting of Florida head coach Urban Meyer. While they stay positive throughout most of the article, it talks about how he does whatever he can to push the legal limits in recruiting. And considering he has a background at Utah before his days with the Gators, they would certainly know that as well.

There was one interesting story that the article started out with about a recruit from Michigan who spent the weekend taking an official visit at Florida. He left the campus and headed back home. The coaches did the same thing while heading to Michigan to show how important he would be to their team. The recruit ended up picking USC but the recruiting attention that Florida showed him is something that he still remembers.

Here are some claims from other coaches that haven’t been making Meyer a popular figure in the eyes of all college coaches:

Other barbs have come from around the country, almost all from recruits who didn’t end up with the Gators. One LSU-bound player claimed Meyer asked the NCAA Clearinghouse to investigate his standardized test scores; a Michigan-bound receiver said Meyer told him even the Wolverines coaches thought he would fit better in Florida’s offense.

The question is are these shots taken at him there because he really was doing that stuff or is it coming up because other schools are jealous of the success that Florida has had? Here is what Mike Farrell of Rivals.com thinks about the situation:

“Any time anybody has success, there are going to be questions. That’s usually jealousy coming through. [Meyer] is a guy not highly regarded among other coaches for his tactics.”

The one thing is clear from reading this article is that Meyer and his staff can flat out recruit. They know how to bring some heralded players from all over the country to play at the University of Florida. Here are two examples of what he has done to help bring in the best athletes possible:

“He recruited my parents and my grandmother just as much as he recruited me,” said Bo Williams, a Gators running back in 2007 and on scholarship at Iowa State. “No other coach checked in on my family as much as he did.”


Farrell said Meyer was one of the first coaches to visit high schools in May, mining them, especially in-state, for top junior players. He and former assistant coach Doc Holliday, who moved to West Virginia in January, spent as much time text-messaging prospects as any collection of coaches in the nation. Both practices have been outlawed by the NCAA in the past 12 months.

So what do you think? Is Meyer clean and these coaches are jealous of the players and the success of his program? Or is he dirty and just hasn’t been caught?