SPORTSbyBROOKS posts a transcript of a portion of the HBO college sports show that looks like it’ll cause a major meltdown on the Plains. This is by far my favorite part:
Kremer to McClover: “How much was a sack worth?”
McClover: “Anywhere between 300 and 400 dollars. For one.”
Kremer to McClover: “I think in one game you had four sacks, what did you earn in that game?”
McClover: “Four thousand. Against Alabama.”
Kremer: “Seriously?”
McClover: “Alabama, a rivalry game.”
Kremer: “More money because it’s Alabama?”
McClover: “Definitely. No other game matters.”
Get The Picture 
The only interesting thing here is how the hundred dollar handshake has grown into the 500 hundred dollar and the 4,000 dollar handshake.
As long as you are smart enough to keep it in all in cash, you will not be punished.
If you are stupid enough to put it in a bank account and stupid enough to hand over your bank records to the NCAA without legal due process, you deserve what you get.
Now you know why the other programs laugh at us.
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You mean if your school is stupid enough to let you…………
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Senator, you are on top of things, man!
Hopefully, this is just the top of the iceberg.
ALL IN, BABY!
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tip, even :-p
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i liked it better the other way
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me too, buckle seatbelts when the dude gets metaphorical
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=62816
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The worst allegation from the SportsByBrooks excerpt is that of pressured clustering. Giving players money is illegal but ultimately doesn’t harm their lives (pretty much the opposite, actually). Pressured clustering greatly harms their future options.
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You mean pressing them to change their major?
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Do you think they are pressured into major because of conflicts with football commitments, or because that major is the only one they have a chance to pass? Does it matter to you? Many of these kids would not be in college at all, but for football. How then has being on the football team limited “their future options,” iyo? It seems the answer to all of your overly paternalistic concerns is simply to not admit any prospective recruits that do not meet a schools regular admission requiremements. What would that do for the future options of these kids you are so obviously concerned about?
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Well, the player said it was because of conflicts with football commitments, so in this case I’d say it was because of conflicts with football commitments. But hey, feel free to latch onto whatever excuse you can find.
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Yeah, but he also said he just quit going to class because he was really there to play football.
There are enough examples of players studying engineering, pre-med, accounting, etc. for me to believe that if a kid really is engaged in a major, the school will accommodate (either academically via scheduling, or athletically via scheduling).
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I’m sure they will if a player is firm in his commitment to the course load, and this player probably was not too tough to convince. However, encouraging a kid to lighten his course load to accommodate football is still pretty shady, and I could see where it would make him think the educational side of the student-athlete equation is unimportant.
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Well, he is there to play football. To suggest otherwise is nonsense. There are at least two other semesters he can take classes that don’t interfere with his football comittment. The reality is he would likely not be there but for football. If he was firm in his commitment to his major, I doubt the coaches could force him to change. However, it might impact his standing with the team, so he has to make a choice as to what is more important to him. 9 times out of 10, they will pick football. We might not think the priorities are right, but it is the reality of the situation
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What scares me, is that there are elements at work in our beloved institution that does similar things. I hope to god that’s not true. I am such an optimist, I’m hoping this stuff is isolated to a few schools, and not indicative of a bigger problem in college sports. I can’t deny that I love watching Auburn tied up in this mess, but the black eye for College Football, and the SEC that can result may not be worth the pleasure of watching AU go through this.
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I hear you, except for the SEC part. Regardless of which athletes and programs are featured you can not honestly believe this is limited to one conference. The events at tOSU and USC should be proof enough, in fact they deal with bigger purses, and it doesn’t stop there. Well-heeled alums aren’t limited to the poorest of the regions, wouldn’t you think?
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I see what you’re saying and agree.. I guess what I was getting at was just the ‘guilt by association’ effect that having Auburn at the epicenter of all this could cause. It’s a bad reflection on us all, potentially, whether others are guilty or not of similar dealings.
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Exactly.
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“They got a name for people like you H. I. That name is called recidivist. Repeat Offender.”
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+1o for the “Raising Arizona” reference
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That sound you hear is coming from Indianapolis, where they have their fingers plugged in their ears and are shouting “LALALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU LALALALALALA.”
Once they stop makin it rain, maybe they’ll look into this.
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+100 The NCAA wants this to go away worst than Auburn, a lot worst. If it turns out that 1/5 of the pay for play at AU is true the NCAA and the SEC are going to look like the old SW Conference in the wake of SMU. It’s not like Auburn hasn’t done this before on more than one occasion, yet the NCAA and the SEC don’t keep a check on these guys at all. Heck UGA, UF and Vandy are probably the only ones that don’t do it. UF doesn’t need to because they get the best players without really trying. UGA should try to do it but we would get caught because we are not competent enough to get away with it. Vandy is just too damn cheap to do it.
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Think of all the dissention in the Auburn locker room when the players that are NOT getting paid (there must be a few) find out for sure that they have been getting stiffed.
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Ehh, I dunno. I have no doubt that there are violations in a lot of places, so I am not blithely assuming Pollyanna goodness on the part of anyone, BUT a lot things about that whole story sound like a National Enquirer headline. I could understand paying Cam – he was worth every dime if he was paid – but there was lot cabbage being tossed at a guy I barely know if you believe his story. And while I know there are wealthy fans and alumni everywhere my personal experience with most of the wealthy is that the frugality that made them wealthy (most of the time) would keep them from paying a lot of money to someone that really wasn’t all that good. It seems about as likely that he got paid for the story as much as for his playing.
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SportsbyBrooks has been all over this and here’s what he had to say about HBO’s motives on Twitter: “@SPORTSbyBROOKS: HBO is on the record to me that it did not pay or compensate ex-Auburn players in any way for interviews.”.
Real Sports has a nice track record of Emmys. I’m not sure they’re in the business of lying to Brooks, who tends to find the truth and dirt like a bloodhound. If they paid for the story, they’d have said so.
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I believe what Chuck meant is that someone — not HBO — paid these guys to embellish. Which I would not doubt, knowing the poisonous relationship that exists between Auburn and Alabama. Two of the four players left under bad terms, at least two have fallen on hard times and one (who probably has also fallen on hard times) is a head case who was ejected from a meaningless bowl game in his final college appearance, so they aren’t the greatest character witnesses.
But as a second-generation Auburn grad who has lived through this before, I realize the more likely scenario is that their stories are all or mostly true, whether somebody paid them to go public or not.
Depending on how hard somebody wanted to look, I feel confident you could track down players who received some form of illegal benefits at every major program in the country. Just bidness.
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Bama paid $200K to Albert Means, who turned out to be a whole lot of nothing, so paying beaucoup cash to marginal players is nothing new.
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Gee, I wonder if Cam and his Dad got any $$$ from Auburn or its boosters. Hmmm, I just don’t know….
I love the mention of Ohio State. It seem that every time you start digging into the dirt of college athletics you keep on finding Buckeyes. Jeez, they’ve been operating with impunity for so long, I don’t think they give a shit what the rules are anymore.
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So let me get this straight. When they were winning the West and Conference Championships they were paying players BUT when they won a National Championship there was absolutely no impropriety. Let the flood begin.
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This begs the question: how much did Chaz Ramsey and his cohort get for a chop block?
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My question is, what the hell did Auburn do to piss off Stanley McClover?
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So HBO interviews 200 players from Auburn that played over the last 10 yerars, and find four..FOUR disgruntled, broke ones that claim they got illegal benefits. OK. They said it, Brooks reports it..then it must be true. You Georgia fans are really upset about the 2010 season..please get over it…move on..and go win one.
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I’m upset that you’re so upset.
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It’s funny, the fairy tales that Auburn fans must tell themselves in order to put on the orange and blue without a overriding sense of shame. The Auburn football “program” has reeked of cheating, corruption, and academic fraud for over 30 years without any acknowledgment of wrong-doing or any legitimate attempt at reform. Congratulations on the national attention your ill-gotten gains have produced. Now instead of just Bama fans, the whole college football nation hates you. I understand why you just everyone to “move on”; it’s getting cold outside of your Auburn Snuggie, I guess.
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Well, you see Jaybird, the gruntled ones don’t usually come forward to talk about being paid because they know it will hurt the program. Auburn cheats. Everyone knows this. Now they’ll get caught again and put on probation…again. Hope you enjoyed the National Championship as much as I’m going to enjoy Auburn’s probation.
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So only the unhappy ones are the ones being paid? That makes total sense.
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If it’s so patently false why won’t anyone from Auburn deny the allegations on camera?
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I’m shock, SHOCKED, to learn that major colleges are paying their players! This can’t be true!
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“Delivered in a bookbag, exact amount unknown.”
The selection of this delivery option may be the cause of the bookbag shortage, an inventory shortage problem since the Pat Dye enterprise, in the University of Auburn Bookstore.
•On what caused McClover to sign with Auburn over Ohio State:
Kremer voiceover: “McClover says what he asked for was money. A lot of it. And that he got it. Delivered in a bookbag, exact amount unknown.”
Congratulations to Auburn on beating out Ohio State! That doesn’t happen often.
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It is always a disgruntled member that brings a racket down. It happened that way at SMU. It happens in crime rings. It is logical to go along with a shady scheme only as long as you are reaping the benefits. As soon as you are pushed out and the money stops… That’s when a person has incentive to bring the house of cards down.
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Enjoy it while you can and tune up your fiddles, PlainsEagleTigers.
I know I would be milking it for all I could get if was was about to be fried for cheating. Go big or go home, right? All in.
The prairie fire is in the mail.
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I have been telling ya’ll that the mother of all scandals is coming in CFB. Either the NCAA and the SEC clean this crap up or the Feds are going to do it for them. Oh, AU grads and fans, if this came out about UGA I would NOT be defending the program. I would want the heads of everyone connected with the program, the AD, and Adams. Wise up and demand that your program be cleaned up now!
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I can be as guilty as the next touchy Southerner of “SEC!!” tribalism, but this story reinforces my reluctance to ever wholly embrace the AU program in that instinct. It’s a shame, in a way. To my surprise, as my hair greys, I find I like certain Auburn fans, and appreciate some of their traditions (tho rolling a tree is just stupid, sorry). And no program is perfect (see Kemp, Jan). But the cheating thing seems to be as intrinsic a part of AU program history as Toomer’s corner and I have thought for a loooong time that they could easily have suffered the SMU penalty years ago. As others have pointed out, this is a program that not only does not disassociate itself from former coaches caught cheating, but names its damn field after one and half its stadium after another–then again, if it didn’t, what names could it use? I was not one of those who blamed Jan Kemp for being a messenger of truth, because I want the institution that granted me a couple of degrees to be clean. But one wonders what hammer blows it would take to clean up the AU program.
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The Hammer of Thor, maybe? It certainly won’t be Slive or the toothless, inept, NCAA.
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