The Citadel, Louisiana-Monroe, and Louisiana Tech

I’m still not sold on Clausen. Sure he did have a great year, but he still acts like a manboy (which he technically is) and he really didn’t torch any big name opponents, did he? I could be wrong, but something about him doesn’t sit right with me. Stay out of Pittsburgh, Clausen! Stay out of Long Beach!

Clausen will make a better NFL QB than Bradford, McCoy, or Tebow, and might never be an All-Pro, but he’ll be, at the least, very competent. He doesn’t make terrible mistakes, already has a good idea on how to make progressions and reads, and throws a beautiful ball.

Just like the Seahawks are seriously considering the African American guy (forget his name now) they interviewed to satisfy the Rooney Rule.

as respects sins of omission.

so that they don’t lose the year. This would not only help save some of these kids, but it would be even more punishment to the institutions that committed the infractions.

1] What is the need for a draconian punishment here? The kid borrowed an SUV. Let’s keep this in propective slightly. There are millions of dollars on the line, and sancations would affect more than just USC.

2] For the sake of argument, assume a draconian sanction is in Order, what should it be? Death by stoning? In it’s absolute enforcement heyday, the NCAA had four sanctions available to it. 1] No TV, 2] No bowls, 3] Forfieture of games, 4] loss of scholarships.

Options one and two are effectively out. During the 1980’s and before, no TV was plausible because there was only one or two games on TV per week. There was no SEC or Big Ten TV contract. Today, if you take USC games off the TV schedule, you’ve breached your contract and/or made it substantially less valuable. So that hurts everybody in the Pac Ten, not just USC. Bowls are pretty much the same thing.

Foreiture of games, and scholarship losses…Yawn. The scholarship losses hurt, and making USC foreit their 2005 season (assuming Bush was ineligible) would hurt their pride. But they’d recover pretty quickly.

3] College athletes will get paid the instant somebody comes up with a feasible plan that won’t sink 30-50 percent of non-revenue sports in the country. So never.

I think his success will rest on his ability to hire capable assistants.

be ok in the NFL. He was ok the last time around. As Tony Dungy (as an aside – I find him vastly overrated) said: It’s a lot easier to coach poor 19 year olds than it is rich 25 year olds.

For reasons I can’t explain, I liked Carroll better than guys like Urban or Saban. He seems to at least acknowledge a world outside of college football.

And it was OK, she baked the hell out of a lasagna.

in place to deal with this. Teams asses the risk of each player and decide if and where to draft them based on their risk assesment. Didn’t seem to hurt Bush. Accepting a car or money from someone isn’t illegal per se, just violates the NCAA’s stupid rules.

Whatever, everyone does.

That Galen Hall came back to Penn State in 2001 (I think), but it was early in the decade. He left Florida in like 1988. He had a put a few years between himself and the infractions, whatever they were.

They did bring Galen to State College for a very brief stint after he was fired, it didn’t take him a long time to find other employment.

at least one that contains players “names and likenesses”. Don’t see how they’d prevent user generated rosters that have all those attributes that get distributed freely and are easily downloadable.

They live and eat better than at least half their fellow students. And the word also insinuates some type of force, but how exactly are the players forced to play?

Listen, I’m no apologist for these big schools and the money grabbing that takes place, but players are getting (1) a free education, it’s not my fault if they don’t take it seriously (2) free room and board, which is basically all people making $20-$25k can afford (3) access to the WAY better coaching and facilities than they would get either in canada, area or whatever would replace college football, and (4) exposure, sparking big sponsorship deals for the NFL bound as rookies and helping land either assistant coaching jobs or car dealerships after graduation that they would no otherwise have access to after being cut from the Paris Bears.

I’m just saying let’s no underestimate the perks. I respect your take, but I just see it differently. There are flaws in my argument (do players have time for school? all this stuff is still less than they are generating, what about the players cut from Saban’s team that leave with nothing?), but I feel like a lot of that stuff could be fixed with minor tweaks to CFB regulation that demand students be forced to act more like students rather than full fledged payment.

And I still stand by my point about payment: paying players destroys college football.

I don’t see that it necessarily has to destroy college football, but this is isn’t a crack at CarolinaEasy specifically, nobody has ever put forth a plan that wouldn’t. At the end of the conversation, even if pay for play only applies to school with FBS football programs, it can’t be implemented legally or even fairly.

You have to pay every scholarship athlete or you’ll get rolled in a Title IX lawsuit. If you agree to pay everybody it becomes too expensive for many schools to afford, which disproportionally affects smaller schools, and smaller sports. Where does the money come from? TV? How does the fact that the SEC has a more lucrative TV deal than the Mountain West Conference get addressed?

I’ve argued this before, I don’t think anybody is morally opposed to giving scholarship athletes a bit of walking around money (living wage is like $10 an hour, it’s not going to happen, your looking at $150 per month). The second somebody comes up with a plan to make this work, I’ll be behind it 100%.

But it seems to me he turned on hell of a blind eye. Plus he let his kids act like dickwads on the field, so I can only imagine that he didn’t really care what they did off the field.

This is a Penn State blog. You’ll find that for better or worse we take a fair amount of pride in playing by the rules as best we can. You’ll also find that most us would rather lose than compromise our pride.

I’ll take an honest 3-9 over a dishonest 12-0. And giving back any win in our history for cheating would be just about the most distasteful thing we’ve had to endure.

I don’t know what the pulse of the USC fanbase is with regard to this. Maybe they figure, “Hey, we’re back on top. So what if we had to cut a few corners to get there”. We can really only look at it through the prism of how we do things.

If this happened to us would I say our program was ruined? I might.