The Tennessee Volunteers apparently dropped the ball in a very big way with one of the biggest names in the NFL.
Christian McCaffrey revealed on his Instagram account on Tuesday that the Tennessee football program sent him a letter during his recruiting days, and the school badly misspelled his first name.
That's a pretty terrible misspelling. Putting "Chrsilo" instead of "Christian" is a pretty inexcusable mistake. That's literally paying not one bit of attention to detail on the recruiting front.
And what makes things worse is that McCaffrey wasn't some random two or three-star recruit that the team was sending as basically a flyer. He was the 70th-ranked recruit in the country and the top recruit in the state of Colorado per 247Sports.com.
That's clearly a player that you want to have your ducks lined up for and certainly not misspell his name on the letter to him.
The question many Tennessee fans have is: on which coach's watch did this happen? It's not entirely clear given the timing of McCaffrey's recruitment and the coaching turnover at Tennessee. McCaffrey was in the 2014 recruiting class, meaning his senior year was in the Fall of 2013. Butch Jones was hired in December 2012 after Derek Dooley was fired.
The thing is some players get letters in recruiting from when they're freshmen in high school (and some even sooner). McCaffrey didn't specify when he got the letter. If it was during or before his junior season, then that would have been on Dooley and not Jones - although it seems like something that would likely not shock one single Tennessee fan if it was from the latter.
Regardless, it's a mistake that serves as a microcosm of the many things wrong with the Tennessee football program during a miserable decade (plus) of football. And it clearly hasn't been lost on McCaffrey.
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