As Tennessee fans enjoy National Signing Day, particularly because Tennessee has brought in a class that can be the foundation of the return to excellence Vol Nation desperately wants, there has been a consistent story that lots of my colleagues in the chattering class have spread that is factually inaccurate: it’s the myth of “Un-Recruiting.”

For those who haven’t heard this line of thought, “Un-Recruiting” is what happens as the hotshot young athletes come onto campus and coaches begin to “Whip them in shape.” The thinking goes something like this:

These young men have never heard anything critical said of them.

They’ve always been a superstar.

They’ve had the past two years of being told how great they’d be at a variety of schools.

Now that you’ve got them, you have to tell them that they’re terrible and get them to bow to your authority.

That line of thinking is propagated by two sources:

1) Coaches that are “Old-School” and don’t coach anymore and have a nice life in broadcasting

2) Media folks who are parroting what they’re told by the coaches that surround them.

Let me deal with the latter first.

All of us who write columns and appear on radio and TV have opinions about recruiting and, for those that delve deeply into the weeds, styles that work. And we are all wrong. Not when we report results, and the folks who do that cannot be commended enough. The recruitment reporters are always the hardest working folks at any news venue and have a monopoly on our attention during National Signing Day and a monopoly on sick day excuses for most of the rest of the year. They’re the best. But the “Drive by opinion makers” not that unlike yours truly except that they’re sanctimonious enough to not have a smidgen of self-awareness.

Newsflash: Most national writers & broadcasters have a limited prism in understanding football recruiting. Why? Because they’re thinking about what would’ve worked recruiting them. Trying to deal with those who’ve claimed the golden ticket and found a way to write about sports for a living is akin to herding cats. As a result of that attitude, they think about recruiting – particularly the more senior folks – as akin to the recruiting they’ve received to join the website/newspaper/tvshow/startupventure that they’re currently partaking in. Which means that they’ve been told how much they’re loved.

Athletes get that too. Particularly in High School. But the best of those Coaches hiring them, in contrast to editors who seldom show the whip whilst wooing a potential scribe, have athletes attend a practice and are honest in their expectations. They will flat out tell a jock that they need work.

And yet those kids still attend. Alabama has lots of things in its favor but a coach with butter smooth charisma isn’t one of them. It doesn’t matter. They’ll nail down good players. Why? Because they have a place people want to be and are willing to be critical to those who have the potential to enter it.

There is no writing venue, none, that will do that. Young writers work for less than young athletes do, but they don’t have to deal with coaches who say “Show me something” every time they submit an entry. It’s a minor perk of the job. But that affects those who write about football when they write about football. Lots of football players want a coach that’s going to yell at them, they aren’t used to coaches who don’t yell at them, and they want the coach they’ve selected to make them a star in college and a potential NFL draft pick to yell at them.

No writer wants that. If an editor yelled all the time, in the internet economy, the writers would all find other jobs quickly. Those jobs might not pay much, but the egos would be stroked much more expertly. Because those of us who write about sports, or write about anything, are all preening shmoos with horrible amounts of insecurity that successful athletes don’t have. That is the key difference between those who play and those who write, which is why you should take every column and radio show which has “HOT TAKES” about recruiting techniques with a bunch of salt and tequila.

Now let me deal with the former coaches.

The best coaches don’t “Un-Recruit.” The best coaches never stop recruiting you. They never stop pushing athletes to be better, to be clear, but they’re also free with compliments when they’re deserved. The “Nick Saban as Robot-God” is a unique model. You’ll notice that it has seldom worked elsewhere. He and his mentor, Bill Belichick, are coaching trees with short branches. They are like John Nash in “A Beautiful Mind” in that they are singular in their genius, and that genius helps them overcome the fact that they are robotic taskmasters.

And that’s a reason to be very optimistic about Butch Jones and this class. Coach Jones and his staff can be demanding of their players and will let them know where they stand. But that is typical in football. If you think a high school football player hasn’t seen a coach yell, you’ve bought so far into the “entitled athlete” narrative as to be through the looking class. The key difference is that the Vol players will not be “Un-Recruited” but pushed.

Given what we’ve seen thus far, that push could propel them quite far.