Stop that, you guys

Tommy Tuberville's been around, yo. He's been a D-I coach since I was in middle school (which was also before I'd ever had in-home internet lol). The dudes in his first recruiting class as a head coach are now 36. Etc. The point of this paragraph is that Tommy Tuberville is not entirely unfamiliar with recruiting and the various things that accompany recruiting.

So it was kinda weird that he literally walked out on a bunch of recruits at a restaurant to take the Cincinnati job; still, that just makes him a slightly skeezier version of Todd Graham. Whatever. It was something else entirely to yoink offers from the entire Cincinnati recruiting class by way of just not telling them.

From Matt Hinton:

First up: Demetrius Monday, a three-star cornerback from Fairburn, Ga., who committed to Cincinnati last summer, and told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday that he's back on the market after failing to hear from Tuberville – who accepted the Cincinnati on Dec. 8, less than 48 hours after Jones left for the top job at Tennessee – for a solid month. When Monday's family finally contacted the university this week, according to his father, they were told to "look other places."

Next up: Jaleel Canty, a three-star "athlete" from Lansing, Mich., who also committed to Cincinnati last July, and also told the AJC he had to find out he'd been dumped the hard way. After a month with no news, he called the football offices on Thursday.

"They said they were bringing in their own guys, so all the guys that are committed are out luck," Canty said.

Oh. In other words, this is Tommy Tuberville's recruiting exit strategy:

Bob Porter: I looked into it more deeply and I found that apparently what happened is that he was laid off five years ago and no one ever told him about it; but through some kind of glitch in the payroll department, he still gets a paycheck.

Bob Slydell: So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch.

Bill Lumbergh: Great.

Dom Portwood: So, uh, Milton has been let go?

Bob Slydell: Well, just a second there, professor. We, uh, we fixed the *glitch*. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it'll just work itself out naturally.

Bob Porter: We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem is solved from your end.

BTW, Signing Day is in three weeks. And those stories basically just confirmed what the coach of Ohio powerhouse Massillon Washington had said a couple days earlier after Tuberville inexplicably decided incoming quarterback Kyle Kempt (who picked Cincinnati over Tennessee, West Virginia and various other pretty good schools) that he would no longer be incoming:

Massillon football coach Jason Hall stopped short of declaring Bearcat football dead to him, but clearly he isn’t happy with the way Cincinnati’s new football coach is operating.

“It was an ugly situation,” Hall said. “I think they thought he was going to go to Tennessee with Butch Jones and they offered another quarterback. But that wasn’t the case. Cincinnati will not be allowed back in Massillon on our campus as long as Jason Hall is in Massillon.”

At least Massillon never has any good players or anything oh wait hahaha just kidding. But seriously, doing what Lane Kiffin does is always a good idea. Always.

Three days before he was scheduled to arrive on USC’s campus as an early enrollee on Jan. 10, defensive end Kylie Fitts — Rivals’ seventh-best defensive end in the Class of 2013 — was told that his scholarship was no longer available for the spring semester.

The Trojans’ did not pull Fitts’ scholarship entirely but rather deferred him to the fall. But since Fitts had already graduated from Redlands (Calif.) East Valley High School, he would have had no place to go until the start of USC’s fall camp this summer.

As a result, Fitts has decommitted from the Trojans and is now considering Notre Dame, Washington and UCLA. More detrimental to USC than losing Fitts is the long-term damage it did with East Valley, one of the better programs in the state of California.

If a Friday tweet from Bruich is any indication, the Trojans have some work to do in patching up that relationship.

Kurt Bruich @CoachBruich: When people are desperate, their true colors show. Take the USC coach, captain of an underachieving ship. His true color: SHADY! #goKylie

/laughs and nods approvingly at karmic gods as Lane Kiffin gets fired
/shakes head as Lane Kiffin inexplicably gets hired by the Eagles

Solve for the "?":

You get "piss off as many recruits and high school coaches as possible," right? Sweet.