This is on the front page of yahoo.
http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/footbal...n=ncaaf-258719
Not that many Tennessee fans were still holding out hope for Bryce Brown's return after the former blue-chip recruiting coup abruptly
left the team before the start of spring practice. But for those few still holding out hope that Brown's continued presence on campus would lead to a moment of epiphany with a full choir singing hosannas to ol' Rocky Top inside his confused, 19-year-old head, Tuesday was
the day the music died:
Running back Bryce Brown has left the University of Tennessee without leaving any closure behind.
"Bryce left town without a face-to-face request (with UT coach Derek Dooley) for a transfer," a school official told the News Sentinel on Tuesday evening. "There's still no news on where he wants to go."
[...]
"I said (earlier) that I was open to Bryce coming back on the condition that he wanted to unpack his bags and put his heart into this program," Dooley said. "I fully expect Bryce not to be on our team.
"The reason it has continued on is because Bryce has not come to me, looked me in the eye and said I want a release to so-and-so school. At some point, that's got to happen."
It has to be said that skipping town with
only a text message in your wake is a very Bryce Brown thing to do. Whatever was playing in his head, it never seemed to be "Rocky Top": Besides the hype that inevitably comes being the No. 1-ranked prospect in the nation, the story of his recruitment last year was always less about where he wanted to go to school than the sheer weirdness of his personal situation. He is the only five-star recruit from Kansas who went on fasts, delayed his decision until months after signing day despite finishing high school early enough to have been a spring enrollee and agreed to be fronted by an obese former rapper who at one point
considered sending Brown straight to the CFL without going to college at all. (Turns out the money north of the border wasn't good enough.) His arrival in Knoxville last August was accompanied by a
recruiting probe that put his eligibility at risk less than a week into practices. And because he had no personal presence whatsoever in the media (other than a press conference to announce his signing with UT, I'm not aware that Brown has given an interview or made a public statement of any variety in the last two years), there is no solid evidence that he ever
really wanted to be at Tennessee or anywhere else.
Without anyone explicitly saying so, it's a good bet that Brown never wanted to leave Kansas in the first place. His older brother, Arthur, followed a similar trajectory, shipping out for two unremarkable seasons in Miami before
transferring home to Kansas State in March. Bryce is likely to follow that prodigal path, if he can find the initiative and/or nerve to actually secure his release from Tennessee.
At least there's
no mistaking the enthusiasm of Tauren Poole, the Vols' new, unquestioned starter at tailback in Brown's absence: