Memphis’ Ryan Silverfield on tampering: ‘Our guys are probably still being recruited right now’

Memphis football coach Ryan Silverfield said Wednesday that a “multitude” of Tigers players were contacted last season, even though none of them had entered college football’s transfer portal.

“Multitude of our players from our starters, even guys that were role players, other staffs reached out to,” he said. “Maybe it was a high school coach, or a 7-on-7 coach, or a handler, or an agent, ‘Hey, you can transfer to this school for this amount of money,’ or they can guarantee you a starting job or, ‘If you go here, you’re going to be a first-round pick.'”

Silverfield spoke after the first day of Memphis’ fall practices. The Tigers have sky-high expectations in 2024, with plenty of pundits picking Memphis to be the Group of Five’s representative in the expanded College Football Playoff. That’s in large part due to the players coming back, including All-AAC performers Seth Henigan, Roc Taylor and Chandler Martin.

Even though teams around the country have started practices, Silverfield said the recruiting for next season may have already started.

“Our guys are probably still being recruited right now,” Silverfield said. “I’ve talked to a lot of SEC teams. They say they start recruiting our roster after the third game. So I’m sure our guys will start getting contacted at that point on. But our guys have got to keep the focus. That’s the nature of it.”

Tampering has been a buzzword in college football in the past few years after NIL deals were allowed and an NCAA rule change meant transfers no longer had to sit out a year when changing schools. It means coaches basically have to re-recruit their players after the season, and plenty of coaches have talked about how prevalent tampering — where a team or someone acting on behalf of a team reaches out to a player who isn’t in the transfer portal — has become in the new college…


Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/memphis-ryan-silverfield-tampering-guys-004739670.html

Author : The Commercial Appeal

Publish date : 2024-08-01 00:47:39

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