Mark Stoops gave a scholarship offer to an eighth grader

Mark Stoops is getting an early jump on recruiting a quarterback in the Class of 2022. Sure, some might say it's a little early to be recruiting a player who won't play college football for another four-plus years, but #WhyNot? After all, Michigan is doing it. As it stands now, Kentucky and Michigan are the only two schools to have offered Ty Simpson, an eighth-grade quarterback out of Martin Middle School in Martin, TN.  Jim Harbaugh presented Simpson with his first official scholarship offer in early March, and UK made itself the second university on Simpson's offer sheet on Monday. https://twitter.com/tysimpson510151/status/991087238204321792 Simpson comes from a football background. His father is Jason Simpson, the head coach at UT-Martin and the longest tenured head football coach in the Ohio Valley Conference. Jason Simpson was also a two-sport athlete at Mississippi State in college, where he signed with the Bulldogs as a quarterback and played two seasons of football and baseball before transferring to Southern Miss to focus solely on baseball. The eighth-grade Simpson also knows a little about SEC football through his grandfather and his uncle, both of whom played football at Ole Miss. So how did a 15-year-old from West Tennessee land on the radar of two Power-5 football programs? According to the Jackson Sun, Simpson caught Harbaugh's eye through some videos of his workouts that he and his father had tweeted. https://twitter.com/Coach_JSimpson/status/970003487999299585 It also helped that Harbaugh knew his dad through their college coaching connections. Harbaugh brought them up for a visit in early March, which ended in Simpson's first scholarship offer. He visited Indiana the same weekend. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="768"] Photo: @tysimpson51051[/caption] With Kentucky now in the mix, Simpson had some very nice things to say about the direction of the program. He told the Jackson Sun, "It's pretty sweet... (Kentucky's) in the process of building one of the top program like Alabama and even Michigan." Ya gotta like his confidence in the Wildcats' future.