Kevin Hart Comes Clean About Recruiting Lies

For the past few days, the college football recruiting world has been following the story of Kevin Hart, a prep school player from Northern Nevada. On Saturday, at a school assembly and press conference, Hart announced that he would be signing with Cal to play as part of their offensive line. His coach and family looked on with pride.

Just one problem – Cal had never recruited Hart. In fact, neither had Oregon, the school Hart had reported that he was turning down to play for Cal. In fact…no one had recruited Hart. Both schools were kind of like “umm…ok….”

So, we all turned in anger to finding the man responsible – Kevin Riley, allegedly a promoter Hart had paid and who had made Hart believe that these schools wanted him. Hart filed a police report and college football fans everywhere were up in arms about how someone could dash a student’s dreams like that.

Ok, two problems – Cal had never recruited Hart…and there is no one named Kevin Riley. Well, maybe there is someone named Kevin Riley, but no one Hart paid for promotion.

It was all a lie.

It seems a bit Hollywood to me, but the real story here is that Hart wasn’t to play for a Div-I school so badly that he thought it would be a good idea to pretend he was led to believe he was being recruited. And then, when the school was confused, he would blame it on a promoter stealing his money and lying. Maybe he thought the school would feel bad for him and sign him anyway? Or, maybe he thought that the national attention would get someone to sign him (or, at least look at his tapes)?

He got found out quite easily, however, when he couldn’t give the police any information about the so-called shady promoter – no phone number, no canceled checks, no physical description. So, he came clean…and for that, I do commend him.

And I soooooo want to make fun of this kid right now. Trust me, I’m the queen of snark and have been called a bitch on more than one occasion.

But instead…I’m actually just kinda sad. I mean, this kid just really wanted to play. Being from a prep school is hard, since chances are that you don’t have a good football team and you don’t have a schedule worth talking about. So, even if a recruiter does notice you, they don’t have much to go on, especially for an offensive lineman. What he did was wrong…but I can’t say that I don’t understand.

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