As always with recruiting, there are dozens, if not hundreds of rumors that surround the status of various prospects. This is especially true with football recruiting. Lately, it seems that OSU may lose 3-4 of its top ranked prospects to other schools (for various, and ridiculous reasons). Consequently, I've began to wonder how these rumors start and where the information in general comes from, specifically, where the staff at 11w and other OSU recruiting sites get their information. There seems to be two truths at play here. The first is that negative recruiting mostly occurs between coaches of different schools. The second is that recruiting media like 11w (and BuckNuts, etc.) get at least some of their information from other recruiting media that cover non-OSU schools, and even the information they get from the programs may come from said recruiting websites. So I ask, is it possible/likely that other schools' recruiting websites share false information in order to influence the publication of fake stories that may impact those recruits final decision in regard to what school they will commit/sign with? In other words, do other recruiting websites 'negatively recruit' against OSU websites in order to get them to publish stories that can/may/do ultimately influence the recruiting process as a whole?