Rival Coaches Mentioned KKK Rally To Ole Miss Recruit (But No One Negative Recruits)

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Ever notice how college coaches often complain about negative recruiting… yet none of them admit to doing it?  How’s that work?

Here’s how: They all negatively recruit.  Or at least the great majority of coaches negative recruit.  How could they not? 

“We’ve got a better campus than they have.” 

“We’ve got a better hotel management program than they’ve got.” 

“We’ve got fewer KKK rallies on our campus.”  Wait.  What?  Huh?

SportsByBrooks.com has connected some dots from across a number of Ole Miss fansites and to show that a new UM commitment says coaches from other schools scared him out of making an early pledge to Houston Nutt… by warning of last year’s KKK rally on the Ole Miss campus.

According to RebelSports.net:


“(Floyd) Raven said rival schools had repeatedly made him aware of a 2009 Ku Klux Klan demonstration on the Ole Miss campus, one that was met by a student-led, multi-racial, non-violent protest of the Klan’s presence.  The implication from rival recruiters was racism was a problem at Ole Miss.”


And according to OMSpirit.com, Raven said:


“I didn’t start learning about the race issues until I started getting recruited by Ole Miss and a lot of fans would send me stuff to my Facebook page about the Klan gathering when they played LSU and things like that.  Some coaches would tell me some things too so it made me really nervous and that’s why I waited so long to commit.”


Raven saw no racial issues on a visit to Oxford and therefore committed to the Rebels on Saturday.

In case you’ve forgotten, the KKK “rally” in November of 2009 turned out to be a group of 11 rednecks who gave a few Nazi salutes before being shouted down by Ole Miss students.  The rally was scheduled because UM officials had ix-nayed a song called “From Dixie with Love” from Ole Miss’ pregame festivities.

Last November, Nutt made the following statement when asked if rivals were using the Klan rally to recruit against his program:


“Without a doubt.  And that’s fine.  It’s not going to help them.  This is one program in the state that’s getting very strong.”


Nutt’s comment about “one program in the state” seemed to suggest that Dan Mullen’s Mississippi State program might have been involved in the negative recruiting.  Mullen said he would never do such a thing — nobody ever would, right? — and then he whipped Nutt in the Egg Bowl.  Afterwards he famously said that his program was the one going in the right direction.

Ugly stuff.  And definitely something to remember the next time your school’s head coach whines about negative recruiting and then follows it up by saying, “But I don’t do it.”  Well a lot of somebodies do it.  Just ask Floyd Raven.