Auburn coach Bruce Pearl and his staff are having quite a weekend.
After landing 6-foot-6 Danjel Purifoy a few days ago, they got a commitment this weekend from 6-8 Findlay Prep forward Horace Spencer during his visit, according to his coach, Rick Barrett.
“It took me by surprise,” Horace Spencer Sr. told SNY.tv on Sunday. “I didn’t think he was ready, but he liked everything they had to say and what they wanted to do. [Assistant coach] Chuck Person was a big reason he liked this school. We had more visits to do [but] they said he can play the 4, 3 or 2 defensively and he will start.”
Spencer, a native of the Philadelphia area, also considered Rutgers, Temple, Providence, UNLV, Purdue, Xavier, Cincinnati, Xavier, Oklahoma State, Oregon, Washington State, Georgetown, Georgia Tech, South Florida, Florida State, Florida.
The Auburn staff, led by Person, landed both Purifoy and Spencer despite the fact that Pearl wasn’t able to recruit in July because of his show-cause penalty. As of 12:01 Sunday morning, Pearl was able to recruit again and Spencer committed at 12:20 a.m.
“The challenge this past July was I wasn’t able to evaluate, and there were a lot of young prospects I would have liked to have seen,” he told the Auburn Website. “In some ways, we’re still behind. But what I did was to take some of that time when I couldn’t be on the road and I spent time at practice. In July, the assistant coaches were on the road recruiting and I was here running practices by myself. That was productive. The second thing was to develop the program and serve Auburn in as many ways as I could.
“Just because I can start recruiting now doesn’t mean the development of the program stops. I’m trying to change the culture. I’ve been to Huntsville, I’ve been to Muscle Shoals, I’m going to be in middle Tennessee. We open the SEC schedule at Vanderbilt, and one of the steps in developing the program is to get our fans to travel. I’ve been reaching out to those different communities. I will continue to do that.
