Jim Fuller:
Ramblings from The Runway: Not exactly great PR for new UConn staff. (worth the read but here's a snippet)
>>This is not a good look for UConn. First of all, since Dickens is not signed, there's nothing UConn can say on the record to refute this report. I know this happens in recruiting. I just saw a tweet that said there were 189 football decommits last January. Still, it's a part of the recruiting process that is hard to deal with and harder to defend regardless of how often it happens. My hope is that Dickens (who tweeted that he was offered by URI) and Byczko land on their feet and have a great four or five years of college both on and off the field.
I also get the other side of the story. Randy Edsall is trying to salvage this recruiting class and improve the talent level of a program coming off a 3-9 season. There was already a perception that Bob Diaco's staff weren't the best at identifying talent (although one UConn decommit started as a redshirt freshman at South Florida and another one recently was offered by Baylor). Edsall and his staff do have the right to look at the players who committed to UConn when Diaco was running things and determine that those players either don't fit the scheme or don't have the talent or aren't as good of a fit as other players the Huskies are recruiting. There's not a painless way to navigate through this process especially when a coaching hire is made in late December and the staff is being finalized as the open recruiting period gets underway. Certainly this is not exactly the kind of press the UConn program is looking for especially with some national media types posting about it on social media. Ten years ago something like this would generate a little initial attention that would quickly subside. In this age of social media and blogs, the heat on UConn figures to be more sustained and more intense.<<
