Notes: Alabama OC Tommy Rees and Northwestern linked, but not well-suited | Goodbread

Count me stunned if Tommy Rees is tapped to clean up the mess at Northwestern as the Wildcats' next head football coach.

Is Alabama football's just-hired offensive coordinator a legitimate candidate? That's a different question, and suggestions in the media that he's "one to watch" aren't at all unfounded, given that he went to high school in the Chicago area and briefly worked as a Northwestern graduate assistant in 2015.

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But even a surface-level examination of the circumstances under which the school fired coach Pat Fitzgerald on Monday — a widespread culture of alleged sexualized hazing among football players — leaves Northwestern Director of Athletics Derrick Gragg with almost no choice but to hire someone with head coaching experience. For the incoming coach, this will be a five-alarm fire on multiple fronts, and to extinguish a blaze like that, you don't choose someone who's never run a program from the big chair.

That would eliminate Rees, 31, who is one of the coaching profession's up-and-comers but has built that reputation strictly as an assistant.

Gragg, less than three years into the role, is under fire over these allegations himself, even though he didn't hire Fitzgerald. But he'll very much be remembered for the choice he's got to make now. If he didn't know it already, administrative skill and fundraising prowess only take an athletic director so far. They're ultimately remembered, and judged, for the successes and failures of the coaches they hire.

And an assistant coach, even one as well-regarded as Rees, isn't the answer to meet this moment.

Overseas Tide

Most notable among Alabama's flurry of football recruiting commitments of late is linebacker Justin Okoronkwo, not only because he's from Germany, but because he didn't transfer to the U.S. for his last year or two of high school, as nearly all international prospects do. The 6-foot-3, 225-pounder will come to UA without a down of experience playing in America. That largely explains why he's rated only a 3-star prospect by the recruiting services; there's just no clean evaluation to be had against German prep competition. But having camped at top schools all over the U.S. (he was first offered by Michigan and initially committed to Maryland), you can bet he's elite athletically.

NCAA drops hammer in Knoxville

While Tennessee escaped a postseason ban in Friday's release of NCAA penalties for recruiting violations under former coach Jeremy Pruitt, that doesn't mean the NCAA Infractions Committee's ruling didn't have some teeth. Pruitt, the former Alabama defensive coordinator who played defensive back at UA in the early 1990s, was not only hit with a six-year show cause penalty, he'll be suspended for his entire first season of employment if he gets back into college coaching during the six-year window. Fair or not, that's a hard-driven nail that underscores the NCAA's stance on his culpability in 18 Level-I infractions. As for UT, the Vols were penalized an additional 12 scholarships over a five-year probation window, beyond the 16 that had been self-imposed. In a vast array of penalties that will restrict recruiting and included fines in the millions for the Vols, those are the two that will impact both Pruitt and his former school the most.

Tuscaloosa News columnist Chase Goodbread is also the weekly co-host of Crimson Cover TV on WVUA-23 and the Talkin' Tide podcast. Reach him at cgoodbread@gannett.com. Follow on Twitter @chasegoodbread.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Goodbread: Alabama OC Tommy Rees, Northwestern linked, but not suited