Willie Lyles offers a national recruiting package?!? Uh huh, riiiight

Cecil Newton, please step aside, college football’s new public enemy #1 is Willie Lyles. Sorry Cecil, but you had your time in the sun, the Joe Schads and Mark Schlabachs or the world are now interested in whether or not Willie may have taken cash in return for getting blue chip recruit Lache Seastrunk to sign with Oregon.

In the piece I put out yesterday, I provided some background on how Oregon paid a $25,000 fee last year to Lyles’ recruiting business, Complete Scouting Services. NCAA investigators have now requested more documentation from the school related to that payment. Obviously, they have some doubts as to the legitimacy of CSS.

Rob Moseley of the Eugene Register-Guard tweeted about some unusual activity on the CSS web site in the last few days:

He went into much greater detail in a piece he wrote yesterday:

No doubt among the documents requested by the NCAA were two invoices released Friday by the university in response to a public records request from The Register-Guard. The invoices show the payment of $25,000 to Complete Scouting Services and another of $3,745 to New Level Athletics, which is co-owned by a former player under Kelly at New Hampshire and which hosts training camps several Oregon players attended while in high school.

The payment to Complete Scouting Services was made in March 2010, a little more than a month after Seastrunk signed with Oregon.

It specifies, however, that the payment is for services rendered in the following year’s recruiting cycle, specifically a “2011 National Package” of information on prospective recruits.

The invoice notes that the package “includes Game Film and Highlight Film from Texas, Florida, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Missouri, California, Virginia, Maryland, Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Oregon and Washington.”

The website for Complete Scouting Services on Friday evening listed just such a “national package” of high school recruiting information at a price of $25,000.

Earlier in the day, however, there was no reference to prices for high school information, only junior colleges, at a cost of $15,000 for a national package. (Eugene Register-Guard)

So if the national package offered by CSS apparently didn’t exist until last night, what exactly did Oregon pay for last year?

According to the CSS web site, here’s how their national packages are broken down:

High School Price Listing

Film Package: Texas, Florida, California and Georgia $5000 each state. Every other state $2500 per state.

State Package: $5000 per state.

Regional Packages include West, Southwest, Northeast, Southeast and the Mid West: $10000 per region

The “Trifecta” Package: Choose any three states that you want coverage: $14000 per custom package

National Package: $25,000

Each package includes monthly profiles with evaluations, access to the Complete Scouting website and extensive spreadsheets with player information from the states that are purchased. The National Package includes film from every state. (CompleteScouting.com)

Obviously, the onus is now on Oregon to provide the scouting materials and videos that Lyles supposedly sold to them.  And with a $25,000 price tag attached to the stuff, I’m guessing the NCAA expects to see something more substantial than a bunch of links to prospect videos at Rivals.com.

The CSS web site, though, does provide an example of what it supposedly has to offer:

Fair enough, this example features 10 recruits in video clips that appear to be of decent quality.  Here’s the thing, though: how comprehensive is the “national” database that Lyles offers? I ask that because CSS appears to be a solo endeavor:

The one-person Complete Scouting Services operation is, according to Harris County property tax records, located at Lyles’ home address in Houston. (SportsByBrooks.com)

For $25,000, I would expect to see a package that provides clips and detailed scouting reports for literally hundreds of prospects, not just 10.  And staying on top of an enterprise like that would take a lot of effort, which in my mind wouldn’t leave much time for Lyles to serve as a direct mentor to any specific recruit.

But instead of encoding videos and spending countless hours scouting, Lyles did in fact spend a great deal of time with Seastrunk.   And that seems mighty curious to the NCAA.