It's one thing to be candid and honest.
It's another to arm your enemy with candor and honesty.
That's exactly what West Virginia coach Dana Holgorsen has done in saying that lying to recruits is business as usual in college coaching. According to the Twitter feed of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's West Virginia beat writer, Stephen J. Nesbitt, Holgorsen said: "You lie in recruiting a bunch. That's just kind of part of it. You become a salesman."
Nesbitt also quoted Holgorsen as saying he encourages recruits to ask WVU players a lot of questions about "how it really is here." The broader context of Holgorsen's remarks would appear to be about the nature of college football recruiting as a sugar-coated pitch that accentuates everything positive about a school and covers a program's blemishes better than Avon. But rival coaching staffs aren't beholden to proper context. Holgorsen's remark that "you lie in recruiting a bunch" is not only all they need to hurt the Mountaineers on the recruiting trail, but all they'll want, as well.
Holgorsen can expect to be asked about the remark by recruits and their parents. And it might not go over too well in the WVU locker room, either. Every college program has at least a few disgruntled players, some more than others. It's the nature of having 85 players on scholarship for just 22 starting positions.
Whatever Holgorsen meant by the remark, his articulation of the point couldn't have been much worse.
*Follow Chase Goodbread on Twitter **@ChaseGoodbread*.
