But what he is inferring doesn't make any sense. If the staff felt for 1 second that rumors about a potential staff move was impacting their recruiting they have the ability to pick up the phone and call the recruit and set the record straight since presumably Mullin would KNOW about his OWN staff. Therefore that would put an end to anything. If they didn't that is on them not the fanbase/rumor mill.
He wasn't really inferring anything. He was reporting a rumor - like the one that alleged that Rice was coming on board. A rumor spread BTW by the same poster who alleged that Matt A was bolting last summer for LSU, which rumor was the fodder for endless speculation last summer, because every summer we need to have long tedious conversations about assistant coaches, like the ones they have at dook and Kentucky and Kansas and all the other programs we pretend to emulate. Ed note: that was sarcasm.
Moreover - and perhaps this is where your
inference implication falls short - Mullin and company wouldn't have known that Gaffney was butt hurt about rumors about Rice - unless Gaffney picked up the phone and called Mullin and staff and said 'Gee I was going to come there except I heard rumors about you on boarding Rice to corral my team mates and that made my butt hurt so now I'm going to Uconn.' All I hear about D Hurley - from you and others - is that he's a tireless worker who's a great coach and a great recruiter who would have been a great choice to replace stupid Steve Lavin. If that's the case losing a recruit to him seems not to have anything to do with what Mullin did or didn't do and everything to do with Hurley's hunger and skill. In which case Mullin should be lauded for getting as far as he did with Gaffney, he being lazy and Richmond being shiftless and GSJ being a teenager and Matic being a corrupt so and so and whatever else the rumor mill alleges.
Whether any of these rumors contained kernels of truth I have no idea. None turned out to be true. Re this recruit who I couldn't pick out of a line up, it seems a capricious reason to choose a college. But kids are kids, and especially these kids, comprising as they do the stupidest generation since cro-magnon man walked the earth and walked is me being generous, because they were barely upright. I wish him all the success Doug Wiggins had. Me, I'm looking forward to the season, which mercifully starts soon, so I don't have to digest rumors - you may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato - and interpret avatars and read the same regurgitated over blown interpretations of rumors alleging allegations of nonsense. I cannot wait until they roll out the balls already. I smell a sweet 16. Smells like victory. As usual, ymmv.