As someone who tries to keep up with the general goings-on at Kentucky, I think this all started with a guy named Marc Maggard, who is a blogger/recruiting guy or whatever. And apparently (paraphrasing here), Maggard wrote that parents of these recruits had told him that Tipton was asking about whether they had considered Gillispie's off-court behavior (i.e, rumors of drinking, womanizing, etc.). Obviously, the Herald-Leader is denying that after reviewing tapes of the interviews or notes or whatever. But if that is true, I do think it would be questionable at best to go down that road with a recruit or his parents. It certainly can give the impression you are "recruiting against" the school you cover, which would be just as bad as recruiting for the school you cover.
I like Jerry, and he's fabulous at many aspects of beat writing, but he does do some stuff that I've wondered about. I remember earlier this year, he wrote several days worth of long, very detailed stories about how Gillispie kicked off a end-of-the-bench walk on who had won a spot on the team during an open tryout. It seemed to me like overkill, and the way he wrote the stories definitely made it seem as though he was trying to paint Gillispie as a really bad guy.
