UNC coach Larry Fedora calls negative recruiting comical

CHAPEL HILL — It’s always difficult for a new college football coaching staff to recruit. Since most coaching transitions in college football happen in December or early January, a head coach and his staff might unite with about a month left before national signing day.

That’s how it was at North Carolina, where Larry Fedora was introduced as the Tar Heels new head coach in mid-December. He started later that month, and announced his staff in early January. Then it was time to recruit. The task would have been difficult enough.

It was even more so, though, because the NCAA is still deciding on what penalties UNC will face in the wake of the football program’s impermissible benefits and academic fraud scandals that erupted in 2010. UNC appeared before the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions in late October.

Here in early February, there’s still no word on what kind of penalties UNC will face. Will it be an extended probation and the loss of more scholarships? Could it be something more serious – like a postseason ban? No one knows. And that unknown was one of the most difficult things to overcome for UNC on the recruiting trail.

“Well the toughest thing is the unknown, you know,” Fedora said Wednesday, after the Tar Heels signed a 23-man recruiting class. “Because as you’re talking to kids, other schools are obviously talking about what’s going on with the NCAA situation. And so the unknown was the hardest thing to defend.

“Because basically they could make up anything they wanted. And if you’re an 18-year-old kid, or a 17-year-old kid, you don’t know what to believe. Especially when you’ve just met this group of coaches and you don’t really, truly have a relationship with them.

“So for us, it was just be as honest as we could, tell them what we know and then let a kid make his own decision.”

It was at that point in Fedora’s press conference when I asked whether he was familiar with what other schools told prospects that UNC recruited.

“Oh, yeah – sure do,” Fedora said. “Because once you get that relationship with that kid, he starts telling you, guess what they said this time. And so, yeah, a lot of it’s comical to be honest with you. What they will tell a kid.”

Fedora declined to share the specifics of what rival coaches might have told prospects about what penalties UNC might face. It’s not too difficult to imagine. Certainly the prospect of a bowl ban would have been raised. Probably the prospect of a multi-year bowl ban was used against the Tar Heels.

Massive scholarship cuts, which would affect UNC’s ability to be competitive.

Fedora said he and his staff had to deal with other aspects of negative recruiting, too. Some schools, he said, told prospects that Fedora wouldn’t actually install his up-tempo spread offense at UNC. Instead, those other schools said, the Tar Heels would run the same type of traditional pro-style offense that’s been the norm in Chapel Hill since, well … a long time.

“There were schools that were actually out there saying, hey, they’re not going to run that offense,” Fedora said. “They’re going to run what they’ve always run here at North Carolina. Which I found very comical. So it was – that’s just the way it is in recruiting.”

That is indeed just the way it is in recruiting, where opposing coaches – like politicians – look for the slightest weakness in one another, and then try to exploit it. The problem for UNC in this case, though, is that it couldn’t very well respond to what other schools said about the specter of NCAA sanctions.

Fedora and his staff hoped to have some time to recruit after the verdict came down but it remained an unknown, all the way to national signing day.