Skewed sense of priorities

Even though I disagree strongly with his premise (citing Dr. King is just another way of making the “plantation” argument) and find his assertion of Cam Newton’s vulnerability to his father questionable at best, this post by Bomani Jones is worth a read, if only for this well made point:

… On my radio show last week, I asked Dan Wetzel, Yahoo! Sports columnist and co-author of “Death to the BCS,” why he and his co-authors chose to write that book rather than “Death to the NCAA.” Wetzel, who agrees that the current system is problematic and that athletes should be paid in currency, was frank:  He said they wrote the book that would sell. Presumably, in the eyes of the public, the lack of a “true champion” is the only injustice in college sports worth a movement.

There is something screwy going on when we can work up more outrage over the lack of a college football playoff than we can over the NCAA’s apparent hypocrisy in letting schools benefit from the use of a student athlete’s name while piously intoning about the sin in letting the player himself do so.

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The NCAA, where ignorance of the law IS an excuse

The ink was barely dry on the regulation preventing coaches from sending written scholarship offers to high school juniors when Ole Miss’ staff violated it with seven recruits.

… The school reported the violations in an Oct. 10 letter to the Southeastern Conference. It said that a letter, signed by coach Houston Nutt, extended a scholarship to seven juniors on Sept. 14.

But NCAA legislation enacted on Aug. 1, 2010, prohibits written scholarship offers to juniors.

In accepting the school’s self-imposed penalty for the transgression, the NCAA sent a warning.

In a Nov. 30 letter, the NCAA accepted UM’s version of the events as a secondary violation and took no further action. But it also offered this warning: “… please note that future similar violations may result in more significant penalties, including suspension of coaching-related activities for one or more contests.”

The Nuttster seems unconcerned.

… Nutt isn’t worried.

“I think the NCAA knows where our heart was and where our mind was on this thing, and I feel good about what was said,” Nutt said.

Nutt attributed the violation to a mistake, saying the offers were inadvertent and not a way to gain an advantage.

And why should he be?

“I’m on the rules committee, and I understand where we’re going with secondary violations and I agree 100 percent,” Nutt said. “The coaches that are trying to get an advantage by doing secondary violations, they’re going to be punished. There’s no question about it, and that’s the way it should be.  [Emphasis added.]

“… That was not the intent of what we’re trying to do. It was very inadvertent. It’s a brand new rule. This rule just started.”

That’s not just a case of the fox guarding the hen house.  That’s the fox knowing when the farmer makes his rounds.

“There are coaches recruiting in South Florida telling kids Miami is dead.”

Mindful of Tommy Perkins’ Afghanistan analogy, I don’t find Miami having a worse recruiting season than Georgia Tech good news for Georgia fans.