Quick, name your ideal spot for accessing 'euphorically dreamlike mental state moments detached from the harsh realities of life'.
You've got your own happy place, but the answer to this oddly specific prompt is La La Nails in Knoxville - it's verbatim how they describe their salon. Sounds wonderful. Let's take a mental journey together.
We've completed a journey which has taken us to a recruiting visit at the University of Tennessee. Travel is notoriously taxing on the human body. Our hands look ashy and our dogs are barking. Great, let's head west from Neyland Stadium on Phillip Fulmer Way.
We'll pass Serenity Nails, Tippy Toes Nails & Spa, Sequoyah Nails, 54th Nail Lounge, Diva Nails, Casa Blanca Nail Bar, Premier Nails, the Nail Nook and California Concept Salon. So many salons. We're not even tapping the brakes.
Once we pass Vina Nails, look left. We've arrived at La La. Tranquility is afoot. Or two.
Let's pause before entering to mentally revisit the euphorically dreamlike mental state moments we all shared in 2020. Pandemic times. Harsh times. Dreamlike, but not the good kind.
Niedermeyer had just been named National Recruiter of the Year and wasn't interested in having his wages reduced.
That year UT asked its football coaches to accept pay cuts which would help ease financial losses, estimated at the time to be $40M. Two accepted salary reductions. Eight others declined the offer, including both coordinators and TE coach Brian Niedermeyer.
This was all uncovered via FOIA around that time by local journalists. Niedermeyer had just been named National Recruiter of the Year and wasn't interested in having his wages reduced. He had more than demonstrated his value to his employer.
And he had La La on speed dial back in 2020. Unconfirmed. Figuratively, at least.
Niedermeyer's familiarity with La La was an unguarded secret. Once news leaked he had declined the pandemic pay cut offer, an undergraduate student worker blurted out in mixed company that Niedermeyer must have needed that money to fund nail salon visits for family members of visiting recruits.
This is how it started to unravel in Knoxville; that was Moment Zero. The NCAA's Notice of Allegations against UT was released a year ago this week (an investigation which never became hourly programming spanning a full year; ESPN is notoriously selective with what it amplifies).
Anyone paying attention knew it would be bad before the hammer came down last week.
[On] nine separate weekends from July through November 2020, during the COVID-19 recruiting dead period, the football program, including Brian Niedermeyer, then assistant football coach, and Bethany Gunn, then director of recruiting, funded approximately $12,173 in impermissible recruiting inducements and unofficial visit expenses for six football prospective student-athletes and their respective family members and individuals associated with the prospective student-athletes (IAWP) to visit the Knoxville, Tennessee, area.
Dead period is a morbid descriptor for the summer of 2020, when American deaths from the virus were eclipsing 1,000 each day. We were washing our groceries before allowing them to touch the counter. Let's accept that conventional rules seemed optional in 2020.
Pandemic recruiting dead period, sure whatever, feels unimportant. B1G football was hanging on by a thread while Niedermeyer was sending beleaguered moms who had bravely left their homes during the pandemic just to see Knoxville. If you're not okay with that, you might not be okay. Moms should be allowed to get mani-pedis on visits.
Ohio State players selling their socks for tattoo discounts a decade earlier spawned a global outrage. Different times, divergent times, desperate measures and ravaged cuticles later, UT was breaking no actual laws, just amateurism rules.
But it didn't end at La La. And when you learn the other details it becomes obvious why that naive, accidental traitor working for the football program spoke the quiet part out loud so carelessly: There was no quiet part in Knoxville. Their rule-breaking was loud as hell.
Niedermeyer paid recruits and players from large ATM cash withdrawals and money stashed in his desk drawer, investigators found.
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The NCAA found that almost $60,000 of cash or gifts were provided to UT recruits, players and their families by Pruitt, his wife and numerous coaches and recruiting staff.
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Niedermeyer’s cash flow was routinely documented in the investigation. Bank records show his large ATM withdrawals to fund recruiting visits, and players said he paid them directly.
There's nothing in this SI report that is less damning or funnier than the anonymous allegation Jim Tressel rigged a camp raffle in 1983 to curry favor with a recuit (which George Dorhman built an entire SI cover story around).
Aug 4, 2019: Tennessee TE coach Brian Niedermeyer (right) with his position group in Neyland Stadium for team photos. ©Saul Young/News Sentinel
Short version - the national recruiter of the year routinely gave money to recruits. He gave money to their families. He had a cash drawer in the facility players helped themselves to. Prior to Tennessee, Niedermeyer coached and recruited at Georgia, Alabama and Miami.
Draw your own conclusions. And then try to imagine what his Vols pitch was on those visits.
"It's an easy place to sell," Niedermeyer told state media a year earlier. "You talk about the University of Tennessee. You talk about playing for Jeremy Pruitt. (note: Pruitt's career head coaching record was 5-7 with one 7th-place SEC East finish at the time) You talk about playing offense for Jim Chaney. We have the best Athletic Director in the country in Phillip Fulmer. I believe that. For us, it is not a hard sell."
It's an easier sell when the pitch accompanies money. Niedermeyer could not sell testimony or track record against its peers to any recruit visiting Knoxville without bending reality. Money helps.
Peyton Manning ran out of eligibility long before every 2020 recruit was born, and none of them ever saw Reggie White play. UT has plenty of pro players but it's been sending fewer to the NFL than South Carolina or Stanford recently. If Tennessee was going to beat any of the Draft Day or CFP regulars for a coveted player, it would have to have to get creative.
The non-existent quiet part that poor student spilled three years ago had been routine long prior to society finally acquiescing to the idea of college athletes making money over the table. NIL isn't a bagman-killer on any campus. It's a legitimate instrument that can be gamed by any program audacious or desperate enough to do so.
it's mystifying to see an SEC program dive head-first into the probation toilet in an era where the NCAA's credibility deficit has never been greater.
Right around the same time Tennessee started looking into Niedermeyer's fondness for La La Nails, an NIL collective formed in town with a mission of attracting and retaining high-caliber student-athletes. UT's fresh five-year probation stemming from hundreds of NCAA violations, along with fines and significant recruiting penalties will hinder that mission's progress without impairing it in part because of this era we've entered.
That cash drawer won't close because there's too much at stake - the math in this business justifies the risk of continuing to push the envelope. Niedermeyer was just too young, dumb and institutionalized to breaking rules so casually that everyone knew about it, including at least one student who wasn't in on it.
His failure to operate with discretion will keep the one-time rising star - who was still on his parents' bank account while winning National Recruiter of the Year - out of the business for awhile. Now he's a cautionary tale for young coaches.
Programs won't stop devising creative ways to gain competitive advantage, like using financial instruments to fund walk-ons into de facto scholarship players. That 85-man cap hasn't been this flimsy since Woody and Bo were selling on sofas, and you don't really hear much about oversigning anymore.
Roster stacking and management is more elegant these days. You won't believe how some programs manage around coaching staff headcount limits (just one head coach, only ten assistants!) The moon landing feels primitive by comparison.
Still, it's mystifying to see an SEC football program dive head-first into the probation toilet in an era where the NCAA's credibility deficit has never been greater. It's just disappointing the past year of investigation with the details we now know weren't sensationalized or transformed into the kind of content America used to crave.
Tatgate might have seemed so quaint by comparison. Like an afternoon at the spa.
