When Ryan hosted Fort Worth Southwest for its first scrimmage of the season on Saturday morning, three young men stood outside the fence surrounding Ryan’s practice field, observing from afar what they once knew well.
Marcus Holcomb, Devonte Elder and Craig Moore looked on at the scrimmage, wearing red Under Armour shirts representing the trio’s new school, Prime Prep Academy.
Prime Prep, the Dallas charter school slated to open this fall and co-founded by NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders, was the cause of debate yesterday. WFAA-TV reported that the District 11-3A executive committee unanimously disqualified Prime Prep’s athletics for the entire year.
Moore was a wide receiver for the Raiders and he said on Saturday he’s got offers from LSU, Oregon, Oklahoma State, Texas Tech, UCLA and USC. Rivals.com says Moore’s only been offered by SMU so far.
Elder said the players at Prime Prep aren’t really worried about what’s going on around them. They’re just worried about the upcoming season.
“We’re all good,” Elder said. “We’re not listening to the media right now. We’re just going off of Coach Deion, you know. We’re all working. We’ve got 30 kids out there and we’re all practicing hard. Nobody’s left behind.”
When asked if their three PAPF forms went through OK, Elder said everything was fine and that all three of them reside in Dallas, TX. Elder’s father is the director of football operations for Sanders’ Prime Time Association and based on his tweets, it looks like he’ll be an assistant coach at Prime Prep.
From what I understand, Elder would have been a back-up, while Moore was going to be a starter and Holcomb probably would have seen some decent playing time. But those three are headed to Prime Prep and based on today’s conversation, they seem excited about the new possibilities of playing at the charter school.
CLARIFICATION, 8/22/12 at 12:04 p.m.
I got a call from a source who’s information I trust, and I was told Craig Moore didn’t have any of the offers he claimed to have received.
I attributed those offers to Moore so it didn’t look like I was stating them as solid facts — I was just saying what he said. That’s why the Rivals.com offers list was included right after that, so you can judge for yourself and pick what you want to believe.