One thing that seems certain now that Tremaine Jackson is heading up the Prairie View football program is that there isn’t going to be a dull moment on The Hill – Ever!
The Panthers’ new coach once again became the talk of college football the day the NCAA Transfer Portal re-opened on April 16. Jackson put his rules, or as he calls them, the “Panther Portal Understanding” on how to get his consideration to be recruited on Twitter.
Who does that?
Tremaine Jackson does. And he ain’t apologizing for any of the criteria he put out there, even if it turns off some potential recruits.
“If that turns you off, you can’t play for us,” Jackson said bluntly to the Defender following the Panthers’ Spring Game on April 17. “If that turns you off, then August is really going to turn you off. We are about to be in camp for almost a month. I’m going to drag you up and down this field. We are going to get ready to go win. That’s a process, man, that’s brutal, it’s ugly, it’s confrontational. Not a lot of people want to talk about it.
“If you can’t handle what we put out there on Twitter about how we operate, how you gon’ handle it on fourth-and-one when you’ve got to get off the field because we play football a different way. Again, everybody got to push control-alt-delete on what they’ve seen. This is a brand-new thing. If you can’t handle that, if your momma can’t handle that, daddy can’t handle it, then certainly how are you going to handle us? So, I’d rather you quit now before you get in our program, waste our money and quit.”
While most coaches prefer a gentler approach during the courting phase of recruiting, that’s not Jackson at all. Clearly, he prefers the “straight no chaser” approach.
Here are Jackson’s guidelines for him to consider you out of the transfer portal:
1. When he follows you on social media, the student-athlete has a four-hour window to follow him back, or it’s over.
2. Send him your number, transcripts and highlight reel in the first message.
3. Make sure you address Jackson’s staff as “Coach” and not “Bro” or by First/Last name.
4. Don’t ask him about name, image and likeness (NIL) money (which he says he has) when you have taken less than 200 snaps on the year. He says you should have made your money from the previous stop. Now it’s time to play to earn your money.
5. He advises them to pray to their family, girlfriend, dog and any other people before Prairie View offers you, not after taking 80 visits. Jackson wants an answer quickly.
This is not the normal mode of operation for most schools, especially HBCU programs, which are usually excited to recruit from the power programs or the mid-major schools and will bend over backward to get those student-athletes to join them. But clearly, Jackson doesn’t subscribe to that.
“I just put out there what we tell kids in person,” said Jackson, who has taken over for Bubba McDowell after leading Valdosta State to an undefeated regular season and the Division II Championship Game this past season. “People think I’m about hype. I’m not about hype, it’s just about telling kids what it is because everybody else wants to lie to them, coddle them, and that’s not the world.
“We are certainly not going to lie to people, we’re not going to act like we’re not a special thing. Prairie View A&M is special. We’re not 0-80 Prairie View anymore and people are going to stop pissing me off and treating us like that. We decided a long time ago that we are going to be straightforward in recruiting, whether it’s high school kids, whether it’s portal kids, we are going to be straightforward.”
The transfer portal opened for the second time this academic year on April 16 and will remain open until April 25. During that time, a student-athlete can decide to leave his program and reopen his recruitment process via the transfer portal without having to sit out the following year. It’s like unwrapping Christmas presents in April for most football coaches, who can go in and pluck some talented players ahead of fall camp.
Jackson has laid out his expectations for kids wishing to join his program with PV athletic director Anton Goff’s full support.
“The standard is the standard,” Goff said. “The man put out there this is the standard, it’s the standard.”
Perhaps the standard that drew the biggest response was the expectation that once he follows a kid who is in the transfer portal, the prospective student-athlete has four hours to follow Jackson back, or else the recruiting dialogue ends.
“If it takes a kid who is on his phone all day more than four hours to follow me back and I’m a head football coach, you don’t have any interest here, and that’s okay,” Jackson said. “So we don’t have any interest, either.
“I think it’s funny that some people got mad that we drew a line in the sand. They drew a line in the sand, too. It’s one of those deals … I tell people all the time, we are not the same Prairie View A&M. You are not going to treat us like we are second-rate, because we’re not. Around here, we draw a line in the sand and we tell people exactly what it is.”
But not everybody is against what Jackson said in his post. In fact, some applaud it.
That doesn’t surprise or move Jackson, either.
“You know why? Because they were afraid to say it and they really wanted somebody to say it, but it’s never been said like that,” he said. “It’s not going to run us out of the business. We are in the business of changing lives. It runs some people completely out of the business, but we’ve embraced what today is. And the way we embrace it is by simply telling you the way we do things at Prairie View A&M. Take it or leave it, as they say.”
