“Yeah, I heard that. I know Joe, I’ve known him for several years. He’s a great guy, a great coach, and has done tremendous things at Purdue. But I’m a little surprised, just from the standpoint that in our profession, you recruit all the way until the end. It happens to everybody every year. It happens to us, it’s happened to me every year. You know, guys make commitments and if a guy that’s recruiting him leaves or if he has a change of heart and they make a decision to go. I think if we had an early signing date in December, around the third week of December, it would eliminate some of these hard feelings but certainly as a coach, we had to work with several guys until the eve of signing day, even the guys that were committed to us because other schools were recruiting them, and that’s just part of it. I didn’t take it personal, we just had to keep working it and hope the guy signed with us. I know there were hard feelings, but maybe the young man didn’t communicate with him. Usually if you’re recruiting a young man, if he’s committed to you but yet he’s still visiting someone else, that’s usually a pretty good red flag that, ‘Hey, you better stay on him.’ If a guy is verbally committed to you yet he still visits other places and talks to other coaches, then that doesn’t mean he’s truly committed, that means he’s very interested. There’s a difference. If a guy is really committed to you, he doesn’t visit anywhere else or he doesn’t talk to any other coaches then that he tells you he’s pretty solid. When the young man visits our campus or something like that, that’s usually a pretty good sign to that recruiting coach or those coaches that, ‘Hey, there’s an issue here, we’ve got to try and keep a hold of him.’”
