There wasn't much sleep that night in the hotel. Jeffrey said his last conversation with South Carolina assistant Shane Beamer, who was recruiting him for the Gamecocks, was around 12:45 a.m. But it was just getting started then.
He was still talking to coaches from Southern California and Tennessee until nearly 3 a.m.
"Alshon knew what he wanted," Wilson said. "He'd turned down a chance to take a visit to Florida late in the process, so I knew that South Carolina was where his heart was. But you sit there and listen to those coaches all work their angles, and you're like, 'I wouldn't want to be in this kid's shoes.'"
Wilson heard it all, too.
As Southern California's Pete Carroll and Tennessee's Lane Kiffin, along with their assistants, did their best to make a final pitch to Jeffrey in the wee hours of that morning, Jeffrey made sure their conversations were on speaker phone. Mack was sitting there listening, too.
"It's a whole different level, and these guys don't give up easily," Wilson said. "I don't blame them. It's what they do. It's how they put bread on their table."
Because he'd been committed to Southern California for so long, Jeffrey said he did inform Carroll that he planned to sign with South Carolina. The Trojans had tried to put the squeeze on Jeffrey earlier in the recruiting process and told him that they were going to pull his offer unless he agreed not to take visits anywhere else.
To make a long story short, Jeffrey took his visits to South Carolina and Tennessee, and the Trojans never quit recruiting him.
"He tried his best to talk me out of it, but my mind was made up," said Jeffrey, who still refers to Carroll as "Pete."
Kiffin was equally dogged. But when it was obvious that Jeffrey wasn't going to Tennessee, Kiffin took off the gloves.
