The Willie Lyles/Willie Mack Garza Connection

When Willie Make Garza abruptly resigned a few weeks back, speculation quickly surfaced about the rumor of Garza's relationship with Lyles when Garza was an assistant at Tennessee under Lane Kiffin.

Yesterday, Yahoo! Sports Gave us the details on the Garza, Lyles relationship...

n an apparent NCAA violation, then-Volunteers secondary coach Willie Mack Garza sent the money to one-time scout Will Lyles, who had paid for plane tickets for Seastrunk and his mother Evelyn. Garza, who joined Kiffin’s staff at USC in 2010, stepped down from his position with the Trojans in September citing "some personal issues unrelated to USC that I need to address." His resignation came shortly after Lyles informed NCAA investigators in August of the transaction. Lyles said NCAA investigators were conducting a wide-ranging look into Tennessee recruiting practices.

That's pretty blatant.

And Garza is a knucklehead for leaving a paper trail. There are a million different ways to reimburse Lyles the money he put out.

Of course, the eventual "what did Lane Kiffin know" comments/speculation immediately reared their ugly heads.

Kiffin has denied knowing anything about the relationship or the payment. Believe me, if Lyles had the goods on Kiffin I would bet just about anything that Yahoo! would have printed that ASAP.

Why wait?

That's gold in their business...especially with all the universal hate there is for Lane Kiffin. The public would eat that up.

Who knows where this ends up but Dennis Dodd made an interesting comment on Twitter...

I can confidently say this is the tip of the iceberg. WL's Aug. 30 testimony in LA will bring down several schools.

Lyles is shrewd that's for sure and he is going to leave a lot of bodies in his path of destruction...

Going to be interesting.