Braves and Birds on Oversigning
Over a year ago, the blog Braves and Birds was one of the very first blogs to write about our site, to which we responded. What a difference a year makes. Michael, who writes the blog, was an early anti-oversigning.com blogger who didn't believe that the abuses we claimed were taking place existed:
Paging Bob Ley: In Scenario Two, Saban either tells a player directly that he needs to transfer or implies it with something along the lines of "we're going to make your life very difficult." If that's the case, then the Oversigning.com authors are absolutely right that Saban and other coaches like him in the SEC are deriving a competitive advantage from bringing in large classes and then cutting players who don't pan out. I don't see any evidence of that occurrence, but maybe some media outlet will do some reporting on players in the Alabama Diaspora. I can't imagine that it would be very hard to get a former player to say bad things about Saban and his staff is they are indeed cutting people. I don't see any media outlet in the State of Alabama taking up the cause, but ESPN? Yahoo!? Sports Illustrated? If the story is there, they would be foolish not to take it. Media attention to cutting players should be one of the two checks on oversigning. The other is negative recruiting from rivals. If Alabama really is intentionally cutting ten players per year, then that would be an awfully effective recruiting tool for Urban Meyer or Mark Richt.
http://bravesandbirds.blogspot.com/2010/02/essay-on-oversigning.html
At that time Michael was right, as no major media outlet had covered the oversigning topic. This site changed all of that and since that time every major sports media outlet has covered the topic, including ESPN's OTL coverage of LSU cutting players and the Wall Street Journal's coverage of Alabama pushing medical hardships to free up roster space on an oversigned roster. In addition, Florida and Georgia officials have been extremely outspoken about oversigning calling it morally reprehensible.
Michael recently wrote a short piece on oversigning and it appears that he, like many, many others, has changed his mind about oversigning:
There is an analogy to be made between efforts to end oversigning and the efforts to end Jim Crow laws. In both instances, a minority of entities were engaged in an exploitative practice to further their own self-interest. (Note the states where oversigning takes place and see if there is something of a correlation with the states that engaged in massive resistance to Brown v. Board.) The practice went on for a period of time until attention from the national media turned the minority of entities into outliers subject to intensifying criticism. Without the ability to filibuster NCAA legislation, I suspect that the schools that engage in oversigning will meet a similar fate.
http://bravesandbirds.blogspot.com/2011/01/one-thought-on-oversigning.html
What a difference a year makes. Thanks again to all of our readers for spreading the word.
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April 2nd, 2011 - 03:28
Exactly
April 2nd, 2011 - 09:55
It is only one part of the problem in Men’s Basketball and Football and I would not rank it anywhere near as important as improper benefits from coaches, boosters and agents (e.g. USC, Oklahoma, Ohio State and apparently the entire SEC West), or massive academic fraud to increase eligibility (eg., Sociology Dept at Auburn or years ago at Georgia and Minnesota), but it is still a problem that effects students and corrodes the integrity of the game. Congratulations, a great distance has been traveled in one year.
April 2nd, 2011 - 13:31
Players getting paid is not “near[ly] as important” as players getting run off from school?
That’s pretty bizarre.
April 2nd, 2011 - 15:18
You do USC a disservice by lumping them in. The Bush affair was conducted by a convicted felon and an associate who knew Reggie before he was recruited to USC, played no part in his decision to go to USC, and whose intents were to cash in on Reggie as soon as he LEFT USC. USC gained no benefit from this and were, in point of fact, negatively impacted.
This differs markedly from the other schools, which had coaches and boosters doing illegal deeds to entice players to COME to their schools. This is a night-and-day difference of severity, which has not yet been made manifest in the sanctions handed out by the NCAA. In fact, they appear to be inversely proportional. How odd. One would think there is an agenda at play here…
April 3rd, 2011 - 06:13
Yea, that’s all the NCAA had on U$C. Wanna buy a bridge?
April 3rd, 2011 - 07:52
You are high.
April 2nd, 2011 - 19:45
The NCAA has tentatively approved a much wider range of penalties for COI discretion, but the general body hasn’t approved them yet. If they don’t get around to it in their next session, then that tells you everything you need to know about the NCAA’s direction on these matters.
The NCAA’s never had the staffing or authority to do real investigations, so they rely heavily on voluntary member compliance. It really is an honor system, as naive as that sounds. But now so much smoke ends up in the papers, without necessarily the evidence that the NCAA needs to take action. So Bush gets USC hammered (evidence) and the Newtons skate (no evidence). Just a complete mess.
I’m just not sure the NCAA can legislate fast enough to stay ahead of the curve on so many of these issues. Even if it could, I’m not sure it wants to.
April 2nd, 2011 - 22:40
Exhibit A – Raleigh News and Observer. Kid was ruled forever ineligible over the following:
Huffstetler said UNC’s honor court found that McAdoo committed fairly minor violations and imposed a penalty that essentially would have put McAdoo out for one season but specifically ruled that he would be eligible to play beginning in fall 2011.
(Huffstetler declined to specify what McAdoo was found guilty of but said it had to do with a family member or tutor giving him too much help on a paper or presentation.)
McAdoo also accepted a total of $103 in benefits consisting of lodging in Washington, D.C., admission to a club and one hour of tutoring service, Huffstetler said. He said McAdoo has repaid those benefits to charity and that typically an NCAA suspension of a game or two would be sufficient for that amount of impermissible benefits.
With the academic violations, though, Huffstetler said the NCAA relied on UNC’s investigative findings and then imposed a penalty for academic fraud even though the honor court did not find him guilty of academic fraud.
April 2nd, 2011 - 10:03
I noticed this tweet by you on the twitter sidebar:
Do you have a link to this full scholarship roster passed out by Ohio State? All I’ve been able to find is this spring roster which makes no mention of who is on scholarship: http://forums.the-ozone.net/messages/961517.html
April 2nd, 2011 - 14:07
Just a little note on your “race” bullcrap. Of the players that have been medical DQ’d at Alabama, the majority have been WHITE, not black.
April 2nd, 2011 - 19:25
If Bama is soo oversigned how did they get Chris Carters son in?
April 3rd, 2011 - 01:43
because they dont have to be down to the 85 scholarship limit until Aug. They have plenty of time to get rid of the “dead weight”
April 3rd, 2011 - 07:28
Did you ever think that maybe Saban knows who will be leaving the team? That maybe those players have already come and talked to him… Maybe that is why we went out AFTER signing day and recruited a kid that they hadn’t recruited all year? It’s not like this kid is some Stud 5 star Newtonian JC player/recruit… His a mid level 3 star WR.
Anyway, I expect you’ll just continue to try and demonize Saban… which is fine. It comes with being a winning program.
April 3rd, 2011 - 20:59
They went out and recruited Carter because they lost the DE to USCe
April 3rd, 2011 - 21:31
I’m on the border with SC. Clowney was clearly Clemson-S. Carolina well before Signing Day. That’s why Alabama went after Pagan at Asheville High. Ben Councell (OLB) from Reynolds went to ND. Not bad for basketball country.
April 4th, 2011 - 07:16
So Michael thinks Nick Saban is doing evil things, even though there’s no evidence, and believes that if the media would dig into it they would find it. Then you cite as evidence the WSJ piece on medical redshirts, where they were not able to find a case of Saban actually doing anything wrong. Gotcha.
I guess Saban must really be sneaky, I mean any coach who would lie to the NCAA to keep his star players eligible would probably stoop to anything. Or was that somebody else?
Oversigning = Jim Crow? Really?
April 4th, 2011 - 12:27
Josh, I’m sure you corrected him on this. Afterall, what he is referencing is a count of LOIs, not people yet this author somehow got the impression that Alabama gets a full class more than other teams. How could that have happened?
The Jim Crow comparison is not worthy of discussing. In the last thread, I was introduced to Godwin’s law. I want to add an addendum to this law – when the discussion is about anything to do with the South, replace Hitler with Jim Crow or George Wallace.