Man, this story hits on almost every sordid detail anyone who’s ever thought the worst of the Auburn football program could imagine. (No mention of Cam, sorry.)
That being said, a lot of it doesn’t make sense – namely, why Auburn’s coaches would have had such a hard on about Mike McNeil. And there’s already a fair amount of “he said, she said” backtracking going on.
Oh, and Will Muschamp paying McNeil $400? In his office? Not buying it, but I bet that’s the part of the story that winds up getting the most attention.
Get The Picture 
Yeah, I’m just not buying that Boom would be that obvious. Can’t wait to see Shiznit on the boob tube this fall and try to be taken seriously.
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May I just point out the obvious when you start to doubt these things, Tatter Tot Bowden said all this stuff on the record about the team he had coached and was only shutup when the school paid him off with a nondisclosure attached. If it walks like a duck quacks like a duck and wears a sailor’s outfit, it’s a damn duck.There is a reason Gus got the hell out of Dodge and only came back after Cheatsit got gone.
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Who knows what the truth is about the money and the law enforcement angle, but I would like someone to show me where an Auburn player was declared academically ineligible, ever.
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I would like someone to show me where an Auburn player was declared ineligible or suspended for failing a school administered drug test.
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I have this vague recollection of some academic problems with a running back under Dye…not sure the running back ever missed a game, but seems like, maybe he did…Hell there has been so much Auburn Cheats news over the years only a legal scholar could keep track.
Something about the player not going to class or something like that.
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Including ones who were illiterate.
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One big problem….the author has zero, and I mean ZERO credibility. She has some big issues with Auburn. Got this from another board:
Fired from NYT after the Duke Lacrosse player scandal….
Broke the story that 90% of Auburn football team had fake sociology degrees under Tuberville. She has/had a serious Bobby Lowder axe to grind…. Lowder killed the Auburn journalism school….
She tried to get ESPN, SI and the NYT to run the story, they told her no, so she ran it on her blog…
Could it be true.. who knows… but she has serious credibility issues.
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Well, “Bob,” I’m not sure someone spreading information gained from an Internet chat site needs to be honking the credibility horn. Example: She left the NY Times for Sports Illustrated according to multiple press releases and turned down a job offer from ESPN at the time as well. All of that took 3 minutes of googling. The NY Times did not fire her.
The only people questioning her credibility are the ones who want to shift the attention from the story itself, which seems like the usual Auburn scandal. People whine, people get paid, people say they were misquoted and taken out of context.
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Do me a favor and Google up Emmert. Does it give his sordid details of employment or does it show a steady rise in administration from school to school.? Haven’t Googled it myself, but would imagine it doesn’t get to the skinny. Until facts hit a prosecutor’s hands, its all gossipy trash.
Certainly she recorded her interviews, didn’t she? If not, it’s all Pome ‘d Rue. If Auburn did what we all think they did then it will rise to the surface, but not before a lot of gas is produced.
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She was on 790 this morning and said she recorded most of her interviews. The story she put out is inflamatory and asks many rhetorical questions in an effort to appear non-biased while stoking the flames. Her interview was evasive at times, but some of the players have confrirmed quotes. If I had to guess, and it would just be a guess, most of what she reported probably checks out.
I personally believe that Auburn is dirty as hell. I also love college football and would prefer that no every rock be kicked over, lest a Red and Black rock reveal some dirty ground underneath.
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Was Emmert fired from LSU? No. And 8 seconds of googling would verify that. Now, you could argue he left some schools a step ahead of a posse, but saying he was fired would be a flat inaccuracy.
Bob’s post was a regurgitation of a classic ad hominem attack. I can’t stand those, for a variety of reasons.
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I think this story calls for circumspection and patience, in order to allow all the facts to be vetted and – NAW I’M JUST KIDDING Y’ALL AUBURN CHEATED! YOU KNOW IT I KNOW IT… hang on (WHOOOOO-HOOOOOO!!!!!!) EVERYONE KNOWS IT AND WE KNOW THE MUSCHAMP PART IS TRUE CAUSE EVERYONE KNOWS HE’S A CHEAP BASTARD AND THE MARKET RATE FOR DELAYING ENTRY TO THE NFL IS $500!!! It’s like off-season Santa Claus came and dropped the best thing I could have ever hoped for into my best schadenfreude fantasy!!! Hey guess what?! Cam is now just a red herring!!! He was meant to distract us from the other 9 people who were intelligible!!!
Yes I know, therapy isn’t working but whatever. I love this story, it’s perfect; it defecates all over my two least favorite programs and makes them look slimy and incompetently so at that! They even ignored the first rule of paying players: always use a bag man.
I feel inspired!!! Time to finish my novel and finally run that marathon!!!
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“Nevin was not in the business of just handing cash out like that, it was more a hundred dollars here, a hundred dollars there.” Allen says Shapiro wasn’t trying to buy recruits. According to Allen, there was a five-star defensive back recruit in the class of 2003 who Shapiro told him he’d spent a lot of money on. The kid ended up signing with another school. “I’m not doing that anymore,” Allen recalled Shapiro saying. “We can’t outbid these [expletive] SEC schools.” —- Pee Wee Allen, Univ. of Miami Equipment Manager.
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The reporter says there will be a Part 2 to the story that looks into the booster culture at Auburn.
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What’s with this innocent until proven guilty attitude about Auburn? F’ Auburn and F’ that sorry cheating second-rate poly cow town program. Only a fool would believe anything contrary of any negative reporting. If the report says Muschamp paid $400 in his office, sure…
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That’s what I’m sayin.
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Auburn’s football program is the college athletics equivalent of that “nightclub” in town that is never open, but somehow stays in business. Everyone knows something terrible must be going on behind closed doors, but no one’s died yet, so they’re all content to just keep their mouths shut.
On the one hand, I’d like it if they could just clean up their act, so we could get back to having one of the more respectable rivalries in college football. But on the other hand, this crap has been going on for so long, and they’ve clearly been getting away with everything short of murder, I kind of want to see the place go down in flames.
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I like the analogy, except that somebody has actually died…
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“In Auburn, Ala., the influence of its behemoth college football program can be traced by the river of money that flows through the local businesses at Toomer’s Corner and spills into the coffers of millionaire coaches who occupy the 88,0000 square-foot athletics complex.”
She’s got a gift for the purple prose.
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It’s that kind of crap that makes me question her credibility. If you’ve got the goods, there’s no reason to dress it up with a river of figurative BS that flows through the article and spills into my monitor. Sure makes it sound like there’s an axe to grind there. P.S. Auburn sucks!!
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I love that she went to Auburn too.
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Look, Auburn cheats. I know it, you know it. But the allegations in the article look less credible when they come from someone who (a) appears to have a serious axe to grind: and (b) does not appear to understand about what she is writing. This sentence is extraordinarily odd to me:
“The gun belonged to Auburn star running back Mike Dyer. He stated he had been smoking synthetic marijuana earlier in the night with Mosley, Kitchens and Goodwin. His gun would not be sent to the lab for DNA testing, according to transcripts from the Goodwin trial.”
Why would you send the gun to a DNA lab for testing? Did it have blood on it-even though no one was shot in this armed robbery? Or semen? Seriously, this tidbit has absolutely no significance, legal or otherwise-and was probably a throw-away cross exam question by Goodwin’s attorney. Why is it even in there, other than to display her own ignorance?
Also, a good portion of the article is spent insinuating that Chizik was racist and perhaps had the Auburn cops try to bust black players. I simply don’t understand why he would do that. Wouldn’t he tell them to lay off if he’s as corrupt as claimed?
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You could look at the “someone with an axe to grind” one of two ways: 1) They’ll make stuff up or exaggerate in order to bring down the institution that crossed them, or 2) They are the only ones willing to come forward with truthful allegations because they are no longer benefiting from the institution. It’s not like #2 has never happened before (Tony Cole anyone?).
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True. I’ve said this before, teams break the rules sometimes. All of them. But I believe Auburn cheats. And I believe they do it consistently and purposefully, and I wish somone would expose the depth of it.
But the content of the article itself troubles me. Maybe it’s because of what I do for a living, but not testing a gun for DNA is probative of absolutely nothing, and putting it in the article at all says something about her lack of judgment.
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All In…
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The sad/hilarious part is that this program, likely one of the dirtiest in College Football history, is riding a 10 game SEC losing streak in football, and is on track to finish dead last in the SEC in Football, Basketball and Baseball during this academic year.
WAR DAMN BACK-UP SCHOOL!
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It couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of MFers!! Has anyone asked Danny Sheridan if he has any proof?
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“Yet Roberts defended her reporting, the vast majority of which is attributed to unnamed sources.
“I used the same litmus test on all the sources,” Roberts said. “The sources were obviously right. They were obviously credible.”
http://newyork.yankees.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090503&content_id=4549206&vkey=news_nyy&fext=.jsp&c_id=nyy
Selena’s other rule: it doesn’t have to rise to the level of a crime to rise to the level of a column
http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2009/06/selena-roberts-national-mendacity-tour.html
Elsewhere unnamed sources say that Rooms To Go is preparing a cease and desist tweet to Selena demanding that she stop using its name in her Roopstigo website website and Boom says, when at Auburn, an envelope or bag is always used as a litmus test per unnamed sources Tater Tot and Rodney.
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DIF, we have a mad on and don’t want to see factual analysis of the author’s words. She has migrated to the SEC anger zone, stirred the pot and said “Boo!”. Unvalidated sources say that she is headed for “Nap Town” to write about the NCAA firing of J-Loe Rach as a sexist firing instead of the “Cover Emmert’s Ass” reason it was done.
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Emmert and Remy should have given J-Loe a tighter NDA than Tater Tot got but I doubt they did. After all, what could she do to put them to put them in an even bigger world of shit than they’re already in?
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I don’t know if any of this tale is true, but I do know this…Uncle Roscoe, who is, and always has been All In, says things just collapsed for Chizik after the national championship game. He lost the team, he lost the boosters. As a result of this, many sources reported that Chizik had hired security guards to patrol the jock dorm to keep players in. This is the strangest thing I have ever heard reported about any football program. So, were other strange things going on in the Chizik Era? I’d say you bet, and I am All In about that.
I don’t know if Muschamp is dumb enough to hand a player cash, although we have no idea what the context of the handout was supposed to be…the “bad day at practice” Selena seems to be tying to the handout in some way hardly seems logical….kid has a bad practice, you give him money? Makes no sense, but hiring security guards for the jock dorm makes no sense either.
Ultimately, the thing I got from Selena’s reporting was that Auburn under Gene Chizik was a trainwreck looking for a dumpster fire.
And that is certainly true.
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Even when taking into account that Ms. Roberts is a graduate from Auburn’s fine school of journalism. And was at one time their sports editor. Something just doesn’t smell right. She has always pummeled the Barners whenever she could. And I still remember her last big investigative reporting effort when she still had a job at the NYT.
“On March 31st, 2006, Roberts was one of the first to report on the Duke Lacrosse Case. Roberts criticized the University, as well as the team, for a culture that prohibited “snitching” on the then-alleged (now exonerated) lacrosse players. Accusations of sexism and racism followed in later articles. The accused players were later cleared of any [wrongdoing,] and the lead prosecutor [Nifong] was later [[1]]. Roberts has never admitted or apologized for her remarks.”
ESPN and SI passed on the Auburn story but Ms. Roberts posted it on her blog.
http://www.roopstigo.com/
Looks like damage control has been implemented.
.al.com/auburnfootball/index.ssf/2013/04/qa_reporter_selena_roberts_def.html
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Roberts was involved in breaking story about the sociology department changing grades or giving credit where none was earned (under Tommy T)
All of which turned out to be true.
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I hear ya Scorpio…… I just ain’t feelin’ it right now. I’m sure Hearst would be proud of Ms. Roberts.
dURHAM, N.C. – The woman who falsely accused three Duke University lacrosse players of raping her has been released on bond to await trial for her boyfriend’s murder.
Crystal Mangum was released Wednesday from the Durham County jail, where she had been held since her April 2011 arrest for the fatal stabbing of Reginald Daye.
The 34-year-old mother is representing herself in court, saying she killed Daye in self-defense. It wasn’t immediately clear who posted her $200,000 bond.
In 2006, Mangum claimed Duke lacrosse players gang raped her at a team party where she was hired as a stripper.
The three arrested were eventually declared innocent by North Carolina’s attorney general after Mangum’s story crumbled and her mental stability was called into question. The Durham prosecutor who championed her case was later disbarred.
….. and Ms. Roberts soon left NYT.
just sayin’
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For a job at SI. Newsday reported she also had an offer from ESPN. The Duke case involved both a police department and an AD both fabricating and suppressing evidence. Robert’s columns — and hundreds of others — were predicated on public record. Turns out the public record was corrupt. How is that the fault of a journalist?
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I’ll be honest with you. Not my forte. She got another job offer after NYT cut her lose. Ok. SOD is now working with the Dallas Cowboys… and the NCAA has a leader that is more of a politician than a CEO. But I get it. You know architects put disclaimers on plans all the time. Maybe police departments should too.
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All Chizik needed was fresher braids like Riff Raff, a little more ice on his hands and 100’s on SATs. He could have held the Aubruns together a little longer
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It’s nice and juicy and soap-operatic and everything, but if The Powers That Be didn’t lower the boom on Auburn after the revelations about Cam Newton’s recruitment, it’s hard for me to believe much is going to come of this.
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Auburn Now; The Wire Road Trailer Scene
“Do you know who’s in command here?”
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There is zero doubt about Auburn cheating, and little doubt they are far ahead of all other SEC schools in this area, but Boom isn’t this stupid. I don’t questions that he had to see some of the dirty business going down while on The Plains, just don’t think he was the direct disburser of funds, and certainly not in the office. During Lowder’s reign there would have been layers between him. the coaches, and the low-level runners with the bags. (I don’t consider Trooper to ever be a reall coach.)
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“Boom isn’t this stupid…just don’t think he was the direct disburser of funds, and certainly not in the office.”
If Boom is that stupid or if he was a cash money handler, or both, he’ll have to turn his UGA diploma to the wall for 6 months
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He did that just past two years ago. It happened around the time he “Guaranteed” beating UGA to an eleven-yr old girl.
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Forgot that he had already surrendered his UGA diploma. Maybe his karma is to keep following Gene Chizik’s career path.
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The NCAA has too much S flying now to even give a passing nod to Auburn. As we have seen the NCAA is only good at enforcing rules against the “Student-Athletes”. PSU was the NCAA’s last stand and everybody knows it. Miami will skate on a case that would have been a slam dunk to any agency but the NCAA Fter Miami the schools will just threaten to go to court and cost the NCAA a mint..
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What the hell is roopstigo.com?! This article is garbage. I wish it was true, but it is so obviously not true. This kid has an axe to grind with Auburn because he thought they would have his back after the arrest and they didn’t (big surprise there). I don’t consider him credible. And the writer makes far too many generic statements without supporting evidence. I am sorry, I would love to see Auburn go down for the alleged misdeeds of the Chizik Era, but it isn’t going to happen. This article is hogwash. Fun to watch Aubie squirm, though, I guess.
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Something I’ve been thinking about since the Chizik hire is why Auburn prefers to keep its coaches so homegrown? Why on earth would you hire Chizik when he sucked at Iowa State? Here are the coaches they’ve had:
Tater Tot
Tubberville
(flirt with BOBBY FUCKING PATRINO)
Chizik
Malzhan
It’s like Auburn doesn’t consider outside hires and wants to keep everything close to the vest. Is a possible reason because they know they have such a scandalously corrupt system that they need people who will stay in line and know the “Auburn way?” Considering the Chizik hire, that seems likely to me but what do I know.
That school is a rotten as their oaks.
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Call the Bag Man..
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Auburn’s like O.J. They did it, I know they did it, you know they did it, we all know they did it, but the accusers themselves manage to have enough of a taint to create enough doubt for the bad guys to wriggle free, like slippery earthworms that just ain’t gonna take that hook. The difference, of course, being that there was a time when I liked and respected OJ, which ain’t never happened with the Villains in Orange.
It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if this wasn’t some scheme to get their football program shut down so we’ll never be able to take back the lead in our rivalry. That may be the real reason the story is being “broken” by an Auburn alum.
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I am under no illusions that this will result in any NCAA action. It’s just fun to see the skeletons keep staggering out of the Auburn closet. Makes you wonder if 2010 cemented a media narrative for Auburn that’s never going to fade away completely.
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SharpTusk, who’s no Selena, thinks that started around May 2, 1956, before paper bags and envelopes first came into Lee County
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