Fred Taylor Says UGA Gave Him $50K and He Still Went to Florida

These are the stories we want to hear. With high school recruits now getting $8 million NIL deals — legally — before ever stepping foot on a college campus, it's taken a lot of the fun out of recruiting. You can't really accuse your rivals of cheating anymore when it's pretty much all out there in the open and within the rules. I'm sure there's still a bit of shenanigans going on at a few places, but for the most part, it's all just ok now.

But there are still plenty of untold stories just like this from back in the day, when guys would get $50,000 dropped off at their front door simply in the hopes they sign with whatever particular school. Unfortunately for Georgia, their investment in Fred Taylor didn't exactly pay off and they ended up having to play against him four times.

It seems pretty crazy that this kind of thing has been going on forever and there's really no recourse for it. While it has always been and remains a dream of mine to one day make enough money to pay recruits on behalf of the University of Tennessee, dropping off bags for guys who could just turn around and go somewhere else always seemed like a weird investment strategy. I guess you certainly couldn't put any promises in writing, so you had to just play the game that everyone else was playing and hope everything worked out in your favor.

You have to respect Fred, though. There ain't a thing UGA could do about it other than think about the $50,000 they paid to a Florida running back. That's a power move.