Joe McKnight Didn't 'Misspeak'

Fellow Fanhouse lead Brian Grummell is a gentleman and a scholar, but he's also totally in the tank for USC and their comical cavalcade of minor recruiting violations. As a Michigan fan who watched his basketball team gutted and left to die for essentially the same violation that Reggie Bush and USC seem very likely to skate for (e.g., taking tons and tons of money as an extra benefit, not a recruiting inducement), I have little sympathy for the continual bad press the USC program is getting, especially when they try to spin stuff like Joe McKnight's recent admission that he spoke to Reggie Bush as some sort of misunderstanding. Watch for yourself:

This is not a confused young man who is erroneously reporting some detail of his recruitment, it's an innocent one unaware that USC has yet again ignored NCAA fine print. The conclusive point is some elder advisor of McKnight leaping in the second time he mentions the Bush call to cut him off and start practicing some damage control. It's clearly an "uh-oh, busted" moment.

The practical upshot of this? Virtually nil. It's a minor violation that would warrant a hand-slap at best and given the NCAA's lack of proof/cojones is unlikely to escalate even that far. But let's not pretend that this incident didn't happen, or that it's increasingly clear that USC has little use for NCAA regulations as long as plausible deniability can be maintained.