Four-star Kentucky signee Landon Young provided an interview to SEC Country last week, and it's fair to say he dropped some bombs.
In his words, here's how Young describes his treatment on a visit to Ohio State:
I was at Ohio State having a private meeting with Urban Meyer. I had gone up to camp there, and they had treated me like a piece of meat, just treated me like crap. By that time, I was a four-star tackle. I weighed about 270 [pounds], and I was 6-7.
I wasn’t even on their radar. I came back up after they offered me. Four straight days, I got (offers from) the University of Cincinnati, Alabama, Auburn and then Ohio State. I went up and said, ‘Coach (Meyer), what was the reason that you all of a sudden offered me?’ He said, ‘We looked at your tape, and it was pretty good and I saw interest in that.’ I said, ‘Well coach, back when I was just committing to Kentucky and keeping my options open, I came up to a camp and sent you my film and everything, and you didn’t even reply. It seemed like y’all just deleted it.’
He said, ‘Well, if you look back at that time, you were how big?’ I said, ‘6-7, 270, just like I am now.’ He said, ‘Well, you were an insubstantial tackle, an insubstantial player,’ so he was saying I (didn’t) even amount to being able to be recruited by Ohio State as a four-star tackle. He said, ‘Now what offers did you have?’ I said, ‘I had my one from Kentucky,’ and he said, ‘Well, you were an insubstantial player with insubstantial offers from an insubstantial school.’
That sort of put me on a bad note because that’s the team I’m committed to. He called me a bad player at that. That doesn’t usually sit well with kids. I may not have been the best, but saying I was an insubstantial player sort of hit me the wrong way.
This sort of things happens every so often in recruiting, usually closer to Signing Day than the middle of the spring, and the coaches involved typically respond in the exact same way. They either A) refuse to talk about it, B) pretend not to know the player in question, C) say they're not going to talk about players that aren't on their roster, or D) some combination of all of the above.
Urban Meyer did the exact opposite. And while most of his colleagues would have denied Young's claims, Meyer validated them.
"About treating him bad, we don't do that on purpose. If that's his feelings. I went back and talked to our staff about it, because I don't want that to be out there.
"But when you have one out of 650 that say someone is treated bad, you know? We didn't offer him earlier, but we did want to offer him. Afterward, he really grew on me. He's a great player and I think we missed on him early on, and I was very upset with our coaching staff, the recruiter and that area and the position coach.
"That's the way we do our business here. We do address that. I don't want that out there."
As you can see, the narratives don't exactly meet eye-to-eye. But for a recruit to call out a program's recruitment of him, and the head coach to respond by putting his assistants (whom we won't name here, but inquiring minds could certainly figure out on their own) is unheard of around these parts.