Sunflower Slate

WILLIE LYLES

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — LSU has given the NCAA copies of material it received from recruiting service owner Willie Lyles and his Complete Scouting Services.
The school said in a news release Thursday that it paid $6,000 in December for printed information and DVDs of game footage and highlights of 32 California and Kansas junior college prospects eligible to sign national letters of intent in February. LSU also got footage of two players it hadn’t asked about, one from 2008, and 91 pages of largely outdated roster-type material from junior colleges in California and Kansas.
LSU is cooperating with the NCAA investigation, and several football coaches met with an NCAA official on campus last week.
The NCAA is looking into Oregon’s $25,000 payment to Lyles’ firm and his involvement in the recruitment of running back Lache Seastrunk of Temple, Texas.
The probe is focused on what exactly Oregon obtained from Lyles. In recent interviews, Lyles has said that he and the Ducks both knew he was selling access and influence with highly recruited players.

That’s an article that came out yesterday. 

Obvious connection to KJCCC: It says  Lyles got paid by LSU to evaluate players in the Jayhawk Conference. LSU signed one player out of the Jayhawk last year – Butler CC quarterback Zach Mettenberger.

Obvious questions: Why wouldn’t LSU just contact Butler for game film and evaluations? Does Butler have dealings with Lyles?

I spoke with Butler coach Troy Morrell this afternoon.

First off, he’s never met Lyles.

“I hadn’t heard of him until a couple of days ago,” Morrell said. “Never met him, never had any contact with him. All I know of him is what people have told me. We have plenty of coaches that call us about players so we don’t need anybody outside of our program to place our kids at schools. We’ve always done a good job of finding places for our kids to play.”

The Jayhawk Conference’s eight football teams use a file-sharing web site to exchange game film. Each team puts up its game film on the site and that’s that. If you’re the coach for Highland and you want to scout Hutch, you go to the site and download the game. It’s meant for the coaches in the league to use ONLY. You can’t buy a membership. Which means Lyles, in order to have accessed the film that he sold to LSU, would have had to obtain a password from one of the league’s coaches in order to access the game film. How Lyles broke it down from there (highlights, evals) is on him. Truth be told, it’s not hard to get access to the site. You just need one person to give you their password. Over the last couple of years, I’ve had access to the site for both football and basketball.

“The way it works is the site is supposed to be for the coaches to look at film, to scout the other teams. It’s really not supposed to be for anybody else,” Morrell said. “But it’s out there, and once you get a password to get on there’s nothing anybody can do. We put our film on there just like the other teams in the league do. We get calls from the recruiting services like Rivals and Scout all the time trying to get info on our kids. But the way I look at it is they’re trying to make money off of our kids, and we don’t need to be involved in that. Like I said, we have no problem getting our kids to schools. And if the schools want information about the kids, they can call us.”

To put it bluntly, Lyles is a bagman. A conduit between the schools and the recruits that can work outside of the system and funnel the cash and the influence where it needs to be dealt. He can get to the recruits outside of the parameters that NCAA coaches have to abide by. Just think of how ridiculous it is for coaches from DI schools to use this guy to evaluate players in the Jayhawk … why would you pay somebody thousands of dollars for what you could do for free?

TA