The story of Montego Powers has circulated on college football message boards for more than twenty-five years, often as a half-remembered fragment that loses accuracy with every retelling. My name appears in some versions, disappears in others, and is often replaced by a simplified explanation that treats the entire situation as an early internet prank or a chaotic footnote from the 1990s. None of those versions reflects what actually happened. The truth is that Montego Powers was not designed to fool fans, entertain message board readers, or create some viral moments in the early days of UGA football recruiting. Montego existed for one reason only: to expose where our work at UGASports.com was being appropriated by people and organizations who were not doing their own reporting during a time when both the traditional press and the early online world were trying to establish authority.
When I founded UGASports.com in 1997, the environment was radically different from anything people experience today. Newspapers still controlled the narrative in college football recruiting, and they carried the weight of legitimacy, even though the actual heavy lifting—traveling to high schools, watching film, meeting coaches, and gathering first-hand evaluations—was already starting to shift to online communities. People like me, and people like Charlie Pugh—known on the DawgVent as Recruiting Dawg, one word, capital D—were on the ground doing the work. We were building the information pipeline that fans relied on. Yet newspapers and early online competitors were starting to release their own versions of “Super Southern 70” lists, “Top 100” breakdowns, and similar recruiting products, and it became increasingly obvious that certain evaluations and details presented in those lists were arriving there because someone was lifting material from our premium content or summaries, not because anyone had done legitimate scouting.
The situation reached a point where speculation was not enough. We needed evidence. That led to the idea of creating a recruit who did not exist but looked credible enough to be appealing to anyone scraping our material without verifying it. His name was Montego Powers, and everything about him was intentionally designed to stand out in a way that would make unoriginal work unmistakable. He was 6’4, weighed 270 pounds, allegedly ran a 4.6 forty, played outside linebacker or defensive end, and came from “Garden City High School” in Augusta, which was a completely fictional location. The numbers were impressive enough to catch the eye of someone assembling a list without fact-checking, and the school was fabricated so thoroughly that anyone doing even the minimal checking required of a journalist or recruiter would have immediately realized that Montego Powers did not exist. The entire construct was engineered to function as a traceable marker.
After discussing it together, Recruiting Dawg and I agreed that we would each publish Montego Powers in the same subtle manner we published legitimate prospects. There was no hype surrounding him and no attempt to raise message board attention through the DawgVent community. We simply inserted him into our ordinary recruiting blurbs and lists. That monotone presentation was deliberate; it ensured that if his name appeared anywhere else, it did so because someone had lifted information from UGASports.com or the Georgia Grapevine, not because fans had carried the rumor elsewhere.
It did not take long for the sting to reveal what we suspected. A major state newspaper—one that Georgia fans distrust historically, as most fanbases distrust their local paper—published its own recruiting list. There, among the legitimate prospects, was Montego Powers, reproduced with the exact details we had invented. That was the confirmation point. The moment his name appeared in a newspaper’s “Super Southern” style list, we knew we had what we needed to expose the source of the leak.
When we revealed the truth, the DawgVent community did not respond with outrage. They understood exactly what had happened and appreciated the significance of the moment. It demonstrated that UGASports.com was providing original reporting during an era when newspapers and early online recruiting services were scrambling to adjust to the shifting information landscape. It also solidified that we were genuinely out in high schools, gathering real evaluations, while others were relying on second-hand or unattributed sources. For many DawgVenters, the Montego Powers sting became a defining example of how early online communities could outmaneuver traditional media not by sensationalism but through accuracy.
Mark Schlabach, who later became well known at ESPN but was at the time a beat writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, also participated in the DawgVent under the name John Adams. He was not aware of the sting when it happened. After we revealed the story, we told him the details, and he later wrote the widely circulated article that solidified Montego Powers as a piece of college football recruiting folklore. That article has been cited repeatedly in discussions about early internet hoaxes, even though the origins of Montego Powers were not rooted in a desire to deceive fans but in an effort to protect original work.
The Montego Powers operation took place in 1998 or 1999, during the early careers of players like David Pollack, David Greene, Will Witherspoon, and Tim Wansley. It occurred at a moment when the internet’s speed and reach were beginning to challenge the traditional monopolies of newspapers in sports coverage. The sting made it clear that the balance of power was shifting and that credibility in the recruiting world would eventually belong to those who did real reporting, not those relying on archives or unverified secondary sources.
A strange footnote in the story arrived two decades later when Eli Manning’s “Chad Powers” character appeared in a widely viewed comedic series. The similarity between the names is striking, and the concept—an elite recruit fabricated for effect—certainly echoes the Montego Powers incident. However, I do not know whether there is any direct influence. I certainly did not expect Montego’s name to survive beyond the few months it was needed, let alone find any possible parallel in modern football culture. Yet the resemblance is undeniable, and it remains an interesting coincidence for people who remember how volatile and experimental recruiting coverage was in those early years.
The truth behind the Montego Powers sting is simpler and more grounded than the exaggerated stories that circulate today. It was never a prank. It was a deliberate and necessary response to uncredited appropriation during a formative moment in digital sports journalism. Montego existed solely to identify where our evaluations were being copied. He did exactly what he was created to do.
If the name still lingers in the imaginations of long-time DawgVenters, I hope Montego remains the towering, fictional All-American we built him to be—still 6’4, still 270, still running a fictional 4.6, and still living somewhere inside the early internet’s permanent memory.
— Steve R. Patterson
Founder, UGASports.com
El Castillo de Blanquete