Earlier this week, a few Tennessee fans stumbled across the fact that hirejongruden.com led clickers to utsports.com, the official website the University of Tennessee athletics department. We didn’t mention that story here because:
1. No school would be dumb enough to launch such a site while it currently had another coach employed.
and…
2. If Tennessee did buy that domain, they likely did so to prevent someone else from launching such a site.
But if you check hirejongruden.com today, you’ll find that it takes you to a parked GoDaddy.com page. Doing a quick look-up of who’s behind said page reveals that one Andrew Moore of Nixa, Missouri registered that domain on October 16th.
If UT was going to buy a website you’d think the school would do so and the address involved would read “Knoxville, Tennessee,” not “Nixa, Missouri.”
So was this simply a prank from some sports fan who forwarded the domain name hirejongruden.com to utsports.com? That would seem to be the case at the moment. Which might explain why the page now goes to GoDaddy.com and not utsports.com.
If UT was the victim of a pranking, school officials — and lawyers — probably let Andrew Moore of Nixa, Missouri know that they weren’t too happy about his japery. (And, yes, we’ve been waiting five long years to work “japery” into a story.)
