Report: Ashland head football coach Lee Owens claims other GLIAC schools bad-mouthed AU, cheated to get recruits

At yesterday's presser to discuss his new set of recruits, Ashland University head coach Lee Owens was quoted by the Ashland Times-Gazette alleging that other GLIAC teams lied about Ashland to bolster themselves and that at least one broke NCAA rules and provided illegal benefits to an athlete.


"We had a lot of schools that tried to negative recruit us, say things that weren't true, just to make their programs and their teams seem better than they were," Owens said. "(The Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference) literally had a team that broke the rules and provided improper benefits to a recruit to get him to change his mind to go to their school (rather than Ashland)."

"We're going to do things right and we're not going to cheat -- we don't have to cheat to recruit to this school and to our football program," he added. "

No specifics of the benefit or which school committed the infraction was mentioned

The quotes can be seen in their context of the full article.