Memphis coach Josh Pastner blames wife for minor recruiting violation

Memphis basketball coach Josh Pastner committed a puzzling secondary recruiting violation via the team’s Twitter account Tuesday night when he tweeted the following: “Tony Parker.” Parker is a big man from Georgia and one of the top recruits in the class of 2012, and the Tigers and many other teams would love to have him. Since the tweet qualified as publicly discussing an unsigned recruit, Pastner had committed a violation despite the fact that he deleted it minutes later.

So how did this happen? That’s the entertaining part of the story. According to Pastner, the tweet would have never been sent if not for his wife flustering him.

“My wife was yelling at me because I was on the phone too loud,” he said according to the Commercial Appeal. “I was waking (the couple’s infant daughter) up and waking my wife up because I had the TV on. She was complaining that I not only woke my daughter up, but I also woke the baby inside her up because she’s pregnant.

“So I was waking everybody up, I was getting yelled at and on top of that I was thinking, ‘What’s going on with recruiting?’ and ‘Who am I going to hire?’ and I made a mistake.”

Pastner says he meant to type “Tony Parker” into his search engine but accidentally tweeted it. I’m inclined to believe him, since there’s no reason to think any coach in their right mind would just type a recruit’s name (and only their name) onto the team’s Twitter account. Then again, maybe he’s one of those dudes who’s big into subliminal messaging and feels like the two minutes the tweet was live may have given Memphis an edge. No word yet on how his wife feels about taking the fall. Guess Twitter recruiting violations run in the Pastner family.

H/T The Dagger
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