Stewart Mandel dips into his mailbag and gets “dirty” with some of his readers:
… My hope with the Nutt-Masoli piece was that readers might take a moment to rethink what truly constitutes “dirty” in this day and age. It’s been an eventful off-season for scandal-related headlines, and as I wrote in the lead, I’ve noticed fans throwing around the d-word with reckless abandon, demonizing coaches and programs based mostly on blanket assumptions and innuendo. Listening to some of the revisionist history out there about Pete Carroll‘s USC tenure, you’d think he was handing Reggie Bush money out of his own wallet, which couldn’t be further from the truth. If you’re going to accuse someone of being “dirty,” it really ought to be for something of his own doing.
Which makes you wonder why he didn’t take the chance to weigh in on the Elliott Porter story. Miles’ mistake here isn’t one born of sloppiness (like mismanaging the game clock), but rather as the result of a conscious decision to oversign coupled with a certain amount of arrogance in expecting a kid to accept a decision to greyshirt after signing and moving into his dorm room. Yecch. Even worse, because of that timing, that kid now has to obtain a waiver to be eligible to play anywhere else this season. Double yecch.
Miles will no doubt get flayed alive on the recruiting trail for this and justifiably so, but, Stewart, where’s the outrage?
Get The Picture 
Know what your problem is, Senator? You don’t have an AGENDA. All the great writers – Terrance Moore, Stewart Mandel, Paul Finebaum – they have agendas.
This business of finding the truth and pointing out the glaring inconsistencies of the hacks above…..and the coaches they don’t skewer and let off the hook?
You couldn’t cut it in Montana.
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Well, it is always amusing to see little Stewie climb up on his moralistic high horse because as a so-called “journalist” he is no better than a common prostitute. He will unerringly seek out horrendous misdeeds like our “lawless, out-of-control” players caught with a can of beer when they are under 21 years of age, or the Nuttster signing Masoli, while ignoring violent brawls in Knoxville or South Bend that are at a far more serious level altogether. No one with any sense is waiting for his comments on either of the latter two, let alone Miles and Porter. He is still lying on his couch, exhausted and recuperating from his latest outburst.
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Fuck all this stupid bullshit. We need to focus on Richt being on the hot seat.
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Dial back to February 2006, Texas Tech had recruited 34 high school athletes ……then had to deal with the fact they could only sign 25. That left 9 without a scholarship. I suppose at Georgia if those 9 athletes were good Georgia HS students they could come in as students under the Hope scholarship fund. lol. It’s getting out of hand, really.
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And the Les Miles balloon loses a little bit more air. All a coach in LA has to do is recruit his home state. Literally, that is it, and his prospects for winning are limitless. But somehow, nobody could do that until Nick Saban got there. Now, it appears that Miles is heading down the Curly Hallman/Gerry DiNardo path again.
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It really is amazing how many coaches have screwed up what has to be one of the 3 or 4 best situations in the country. How a coach can’t win huge at LSU I’ll never know.
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well, for starters you have to be able to tell time.
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Alienating the recruiting base in the state by failing to honor a LOI is another way. Every HS coach and player in La knows about the Porter thing by now.
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Either because (a) Stewart thought a ‘greyshirt’ was a Confederate re-enactor, or (b) Stewart was afraid Das Hat would eat him (as shown in this historical clip showing Les talking to the camera in complete sentence fragments after a loss and before the post-game meal provided courtesy of T Boone and OSU Grads.com).
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Classic.
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Saban has been doing this for his entire tenure at Bama. No one seems to want to comment on it, though.
He had two guys that surprisingly qualified. When asked about it, he pretty much just said, “They have to wait until next semester.”
Meanwhile…he’s got 9 seniors and already has 16 verbal commitments for next year. I know every program has some attrition and that is normal, but he’s got double digits every year.
When are the kids/families going to figure out that when they sign with Bama, it’s a series of one year tryouts.
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Some of the players have caught on to the game, which has lead to Saban complaining about the agents.
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Are you saying over signing is illegal or dirty?
[Over signing is restricted now, so I guess it would be illegal now.]
As for dirty, I guess that depends on how it is handled. I would guess that all of Alabama’s recruits are in the loop concerning greyshirting, etc.
A scholarship is a one year commitment by the school. There is all kinds of attrition – grades, misconduct, etc. I guess at some schools not being one of the best 85 is another form.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with that. Again, I would guess that each players knows what is expected of them.
Have a good day,
BD
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It just doesn’t seem fair that a school can jerk a player’s scholarship for no reason and suffer no penalty. After all, if the player decides to leave he has to sit out one year before he can play somewhere else.
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Also – Bama will probably have a bunch of juniors turn pro after this season too. Julio, Dareus, Hightower, Ingram, etc.
This doesn’t fix the whole problem, but I’m sure it’s being accounted for.
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You are right BD, there is normal attrition at every school. It’s usually around 6-8 players.
Coach Saban has signed 111 LOI’s in classes ’07-’10. That means, without anyone redshirting in that four year period (I’m sure you guys have a few ’06 kids still on the team) that he signed 26 more kids than the 85 if he had started with zero players.
It’s not oversigning…it’s the degree of oversigning. If you have double digit attrition every year, then that is out of the norm by a good bit.
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…you’d think he was handing Reggie Bush money out of his own wallet, which couldn’t be further from the truth. If you’re going to accuse someone of being “dirty,” it really ought to be for something of his own doing….
Oh, silly me. I thought that turning a blind eye and being indifferent to something so blatant and so wrong was just as bad as doing the act itself.
That’s like saying there’s nothing wrong with watching someone get beaten to death as long as you don’t participate.
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Carroll didn’t have to pull money from his own pocket. That’s what multi-millionaire boosters are for. Carroll was just a middle man.
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You guys are right to point this out. I don’t think Nutt is really the issue here for Mandel–it’s Carroll. You can take Mandel at his word when he says he wants to clear up what the word “dirty” means–so he can backpedal and apologize for the coach that he and his cohorts spent the past decade fawning over.
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One would think Porter has legal recourse against LSU and Miles, but probably not in this ‘fixed’ system. This gets back to the agent issue – everybody is making big bucks on these kids except the kids themselves. As soon as the kid isn’t producing or is deemed unneeded, he’s tossed to the trash heap – that’s the REAL education a lot of these student athletes will take away when they leave college. At least Dawg fans can hold our heads somewhat higher with CMR’s history in this area, though people like Miles, Carroll & Saban have MNC trophies.
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i like trophies
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Yep…kind of like how when you go to school on an academic scholarship and bring home a GPA in the sub 2’s…they pull your schollie to, don’t they?
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it’d still be nice to not piss our pants in jacksonville for once and win a MNC so this hot seat shit will go away,win at all costs!
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If a scholarship is truly a one-year commitment, then why is a player punished by having to sit out a year if he decides to transfer to a different school (after completing that one year commitment). Not only that, but a school (like Tennessee) can withhold a release which requires the player to pay his own way instead of receiving another one-year financial aid commitment from another school.
It seems disingenuous — or “dirty” if you’d rather — to say it’s a one-year commitment on the school’s behalf, but it’s more than that on the player’s behalf.
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Saben started the oversigning at Bama.
He threw guys under the bus right away and said screw a 4 year scholarship. Others followed and now we have new rules.
Takes an sob to do this to a kid working hard and committed though. I know they are held accountable(coaches) and they make a lot of money but damn.
I like our coach because he has morals beyond some of these other guys.
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+10.
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