The key fact that has to be understood before any real discussion can begin is that scholarships are, by rule, limited to one year, renewable obligations². A school cannot, even if it wants to, promise a recruit a four or five year scholarship. The default mode of operation, however, is renewal and there is a deadline by which the school must notify athletes who were on scholarship the previous year that it will not be renewed³. The NCAA also requires institutional hearings for student athletes whose scholarships aren’t renewed and has some regulations as to who may adjudicate that hearing⁴.

The chief allegation often made by folks like Oversigning.com and Brian Cook is that oversigning is immoral or unethical because, in the words of Cook, if the numbers don’t work out, “someone gets it right in the ass“. As you might suspect, it’s not that simple.

Okay, okay. If we’re being fair and reasonable, we have to admit that, in some respects, it is that simple. Schools cannot (and do not) keep more than 85 players on scholarship. If only 15 graduate and 25 come in, 10 scholarships have to come from somewhere. This point is indisputable and non-controversial.

One question is whether or not coaches even need the overage. “Need” is a funny word. Clearly some teams do reasonably well without it, and it’s obvious that if everyone followed that system, the playing field would be level. It also means, however, that coaches are going to take fewer chances on edge cases. The students who may not qualify are now an even greater liability to a program’s recruiting class. Do we really want to construct a scenario in which some already disadvantaged kids get another disadvantage? The Big Ten fans like to tout their superiority and some even look down their noses at schools recruiting players who aren’t great in the classroom. Why? Is the suspicion that those players, if not for football recruiting, would be taking their academic progression seriously? It seems more likely that, without football as a reason to get the grades and stay in school (or continue on with college), they’ll just ditch school it entirely. Are we really in a better position as a country if fewer kids have a shot to go to college?

Still, currently the rules allow for an overage. Those scholarships can come from only two places: more players can leave the team or fewer can come in. The mechanics of those two options differ.

Trimming a Class with Grayshirting

One easy way to make the numbers work is to grayshirt some of the players. This is a punt. The player doesn’t come in until the spring semester and they count against next year’s numbers. This practice is vilified by the usual groups who carp about oversigning, but understand that it is nothing more than a school telling a player that they do not have room for the player and will make room for him next year if he wants to stick around and wait it out. That’s it. No more, no less. Again, not inherently unethical. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that does happen on occasion that a player does not know what position he’s in and by the time he realizes he might have to grayshirt, his options are so limited or unappealing that he feels like he has no choice but to wait around⁵. A strong argument can be made that springing this information on a player in this way is unethical, as it can deprive them of opportunities that might be better for them.

On the other hand, if a coach is up-front with a recruit from the very beginning that he might have to grayshirt if more players sign and qualify than are expected, is that an ethical problem? The student has been made aware of the possibilities and has made an informed decision to take the risk of having to grayshirt. They might make a decision they later regret, that is true, and along the way they are probably being told by a coach that they don’t expect there to be a problem.

In order to catch the dishonest folks, we probably just need to prevent signing more kids than you have room under the 85 cap, right? Maybe not. What if, instead, when a school accepts an NLI that could put them over the 85 limit, they are required to notify the player in writing who is now 86th on the list? You could include with that, if you wanted, the requirement that that player be permitted to rescind his NLI and sign with another school. What does that do? It forces coaches to be honest with players early in the process so that the letter isn’t a surprise. It also makes the situation clear as early as possible.

Forcing Players Out

The other source for new scholarships is by reducing the number of counters. This is an area in which there’s a great deal more nuance and personal preference. A reasonable person — even one vehemently opposed to oversigning — must recognize that there are ethical reasons to revoke a player’s scholarships and ethical ways to do it. Because such reasons and methods exist, one cannot leap directly from “need to get rid of existing scholarshipped players” to “unethical behavior”.

Medical scholarships often come under fire as a way to “hide” undesirable players. Ignored in that discussion is that players may simply be cut outright. There’s no need, save for the PR of it, to move a kid to medical scholarship versus just cutting him. Further, opponents of medical scholarships often behave as though there’s some magical line between players who can play and those who can’t play. In reality, injuries are a continuum and they range from having no impact on a player’s ability to leaving the player unable to walk. Between those two extremes, there are places where the player can still play, but can no longer do so at the level required for his team. A team can simply cut this player, if they choose. The medical scholarship does nothing except provides this player with a free education. Suggesting that medical scholarships are somehow unethical means either claiming that, along with the financial aid, the team has also promised the player the right to participate or it means that the primary concern here is one of competitive edge with other schools.

Another option, as alluded to above, is simply to cut players who are not performing. It is easy to feel sympathy for a player who works hard, does everything the coaches ask, does it with a great attitude, but simply cannot be the player the coaches want, so he is left out of the system because some young player is seen as having a greater upside. That is a sympathetic situation. Given the one-year nature of the scholarships, however, I don’t think there are good arguments for it being unethical.

The bottom line is that scholarships come with conditions. Many academic scholarships require you maintain a certain GPA or class rank. There are law schools who offer scholarships to more than half of all incoming students that then require the student to stay above the middle of the class in order to keep the scholarship. They are, essentially, oversigning their academic scholarships, but nobody is coming to the aid of those poor, mistreated law students. That’s not because the practice is unknown, but because the students know what bargain they’re getting into: fail to perform, lose your scholarship. Likewise with GPA requirements. Students who work hard, do everything their professors ask, and do so with a good attitude can still come up short of the GPA required to keep their aid.

If we’re looking for rule changes to make these situations more fair to the students, maybe we should do away with the requirement that a student athlete sit out a year of competition if they were cut or if their scholarship wasn’t renewed. That would not prevent them from being cast of for lack of performance, but it would reduce the penalty they currently endure for it.

Regardless, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that the Big Ten method of roster management is the only — or even the best — solution to the problems, and I think that’s largely because the primary impetus behind pushing it is to eliminate the Big Ten’s competitive disadvantage, not to help the players.

• This post’s featured image is ‘Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire‘ by Flickr user Brad Gillette.

1. Despite certain Big Ten partisans hoping you’ll believe otherwise
2. NCAA Bylaw 15.3.3.1
3. NCAA Bylaw 15.3.5.1
4. NCAA Bylaw 15.3.2.4
5. Or, at the very least, players have complained after the fact that this was the case.

This is not to say, of course, that the matter of coaches lying to prospective athletes and then leaving them high and dry is an unimportant one. Nor would anyone suggest it doesn’t happen, but when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail and oversigning zealots have been practicing that for years. Every time a player leaves an “oversigning” team, the worst is assumed. Even players who have a history of injury who spend an entire off-season in rehab are assumed to have been “forced” onto medical scholarship.  There’s little in the way of objective analysis — starting with the lack of acknowledgement from most of the club that they actually have no idea what a team’s scholarship roster looks like.

Still, they made a lot of noise², and the SEC caved. The rules all appear to try to protect players, but many do so at the expense of prospective athletes.

The most troublesome of the rules, really, is the medical scholarship oversight.

Established legislation specifying that the conference office will oversee the administration of medical scholarship exemptions. The SEC will have a role in reviewing and deciding the outcome of each medically-related exemption.

Football is a dangerous sport and to play at a high level requires the player’s body to be in good condition. Moreover, it’s not a black-and-white situation. There’s not a “can play” / “can’t play” indicator light on each player, and the continuum of injuries ranges from those that impact their ability to play very little to complete paralysis. The problem with this legislation is in the gray area in between. A player whose injuries do not keep them from playing, but do keep them from being competitive, might have their medical scholarship nixed by the SEC. What happens then? Does the team plod along with the dead weight, or do they cut the player to make room for someone who can contribute? Previously, the answer is simple: the team is able to do right by the player and themselves. Now, they may be forced to choose between helping one guy out and helping an entire team.

Even if you assume that the team’s moral and ethical obligation is to continue to give the player his scholarship, competitive consequences be damned, you’ve now just given coaches who are, in your estimation, unethical or immoral a competitive advantage over the ones who do the “right thing”.

This rule does nothing to protect players³ and actually provides an incentive for a team to stop helping an injured player get his degree.

At the end of the day, most of these rules serve not to protect players from deception and misinformation, but to reduce the number of athletes a team can choose from. It’s not player-protection legislation, it’s legislation whose sole goal is to reduce the gap between coaches who can recruit well and those who cannot.

1. Cook, a Michigan fan, decided “oversigning” was a problem quite conveniently when his team’s head coach needed a distraction
2. I wish I had a dollar for every time a blogger or commenter pretended to know who was on scholarship at a particular school
3. Medical scholarship whining is the place it’s easiest to see the true motives of Oversigning.com and their ilk

Yesterday, the other shoe dropped in the form of a Sports Illustrated piece that laid bare just how dirty a shop Tressel has been running.

Watching Ohio State partisans react to this news has been fascinating, as the gravity of the allegations seem not to have had any impact on them whatsoever. Numerous blog and forum postings continue to revere the man as respectable and trustworthy. Some blame the NCAA, others blame journalism, and a huge portion of them have trotted out the “he made a mistake, no big deal” line. This is misguided, but there’s nothing that can be said at this point to convince them — all we can do is sit by and watch it unfold. All good dramas need a playbill, though, and the one that most accurately sums up the acts we’ll see this time around follows the Kübler-Ross model.

The Kübler-Ross model explains the five stages of coping with the grief of dying. It’s not a wholly inadequate comparison, as what Ohio State is likely to do over the course of the next five or ten years could look very, very similar to death.

Denial

This is what we’re seeing right now and it’s not pretty. Denial comes in several different flavors, for your reading pleasure. One of the more resigned forms of denial is: “everyone cheats”. It’s a claim which is now so well-worn that it shouldn’t be used simply because it is so cliche. But those aren’t as much fun as the other two, which tend to be deployed in tandem: the “you can’t prove it” defense and its partner “the witnesses are sketchy”¹.  These are not the only examples in the wild, but Eleven Warriors provides us a nice summary:

No concrete proof can be given about any of the allegations, except through the pictures that Ellis provided SI, which show some of the players already known to be involved in the scandal, plus Thad Gibson, at Eddie Rife’s business.

Meeting this “concrete proof” standard is near impossible in any circumstance, let alone one where the guilty parties are actively trying to avoid detection. It is also, conveniently enough, a moving goalpost: you will rarely (if ever) see someone in this situation articulate exactly what evidence should be required. Here, we have a situation where Tressel has admitted that he knew about some violations and decided not to report them. He was so unmoved by the fact that his players were violating NCAA rules that he “couldn’t think who to tell”. We are expected to believe, given that attitude, that those were the first violations at OSU he knew about and said nothing?  Even after his history of play fast and loose with the rules? I will grant that this is possible. Unfortunately for Jim Tressel, once you are determined to be a liar, your claims of innocence and/or ignorance are much more difficult to swallow.

Based off of interviews from two anonymous former employees of Eddie Rife, Dustin Halko and a man called “Ellis” for the purpose of this article, it is the central issue for a number of reasons. First, there’s basically no chance in hell that any NCAA investigator would be able to find something solid on alleged misconduct by players years after the fact based on the testimony of a convict.

I read that statement several times, probing for sarcasm or irony, but found none. It’s a somewhat bewildering stance, given both that the standard of proof required by the NCAA is far lower than that required by criminal courts, and criminal courts regularly convict people well after the fact on the testimony of current and former criminals, but also because this could easily be a description of how the NCAA came to nail USC to the wall for Reggie Bush.

There seems to be little in the way of denial that the events took place, but a great deal of denial that the NCAA will care. For starters, if players — even “just” 28 of them — made habit and practice of exchanging the spoils of their athleticism for profit, it wouldn’t be a far stretch for the NCAA to rule them retroactively ineligible  for violating amateurism rules. There’s also the looming specter of both “Failure to Monitor” and “Lack of Institutional Control”, both of which are their own violations to deal with, and neither of which are particularly helped by claims of ignorance. Even if these additional cases do not result in additional violations, you can bet that when the COI is setting the penalties, these will be discussed.

Assuming the SI piece is “much ado about nothing” is a spectacular work of denial.

Anger

In the not-too-distant future, the NCAA is going to have something to say about this (and the other investigations currently on-going). When the head-coach of your program gets caught explicitly ignoring NCAA rules just to win some games, there are going to be consequences. Probably severe ones, as the NCAA relies on self-policing to a large extent, which means they have a tremendous incentive to make covering-up cheating even less attractive than just cheating.

There will be anger.

The anger will be pointed in a nearly unlimited number of directions. OSU fans will blame the NCAA, Michigan, the SEC, shady tattoo artists, coaches and players who they’ve disowned, and countless others. It will be vitriolic, intense, and real. Mere mention of the NCAA or Tressel will probably raise the average OSU fan’s blood pressure measurably. There will be conspiracy theories, allegations of both “hatin’” and “snitchin’”, and an occasional threat of retalition.

It’ll all be for nothing, of course, because it appears that OSU has earned a bit of punishment (probably on par with USC’s), but that’s how it’ll go.

Bargaining

This is a process that will be more undertaken by the University², and has probably already started. Leading up to the infractions, this will be done by throwing employees under the bus and being very accommodating to NCAA investigators. Tressel’s “resignation” was likely the first offering. If sanctions are released, a new round of bargaining will take place wherein OSU will  explain why their punishment was totally excessive and undeserved.

You likely won’t see much of this from the fans, unless they’re drunk and weepy, which is unfortunate if you delight in the misfortune of others because the bargaining stage is easily the most pathetic of the two.

Depression

You will be able to witness this for anywhere from three to ten years after the NCAA hands down its sanctions. It will look exactly like you’d expect it to look like when a team spends a decade winning and then has that taken away from them.

Acceptance

We’re still a long ways off from this, but if even Alabama fans can come to accept that their team deserved what it got in the Albert Means scandal, Ohio State fans will figure it out, too. Although probably not as quickly³.

Maybe the most compelling part of this story is that it isn’t over yet. A couple of kids trading jerseys for tattoos is likely the tip of the corruption iceberg. One reason why the NCAA puts such an emphasis on “promoting an environment of compliance” is that it is difficult or impossible to teach that some external rules can be broken but some of them cannot. The list of “acceptable” crimes will begin to creep, little by little, until you get to the point where really anything is okay as long as you don’t get caught. After all, is trading merchandise for cash really all that different from pay-for-play?

• This post’s featured image is ‘So this is why people think we bury our head in the sand‘ by Flickr user sallylondon.

1. The latter being a close cousin of the “Haterz” defense.
2. This is not, in any strict sense, the way “bargaining” is described in the  model, and I’m okay with that.
3. S-E-C SPEEEEED

The infractions that Tressel turned a blind eye toward were relatively minor, but it’s the unethical conduct and dishonesty which are the real issues here. The NCAA lacks the enforcement budget and subpoena power of state and federal governments, as a result, they rely to a great degree on self-policing to enforce the rules. It’s important that attempts to circumvent this system be punished severely — the costs of getting caught trying to not get caught should be orders of magnitude larger than owning up to the decision.

To their credit, the Buckeyes did self-report both the original infractions and Tressel’s dishonesty, but only after the institution had gained a competitive advantage by ignoring it.  The most reasonable course here is for the NCAA to vacate OSU’s 2010 season.

The decision to suspend OSU’s players for their receipt of impermissible benefits was expected. What surprised many was the reinstatement committee’s decision to allow those suspensions to begin at the start of the 2011 football season, rather than forcing some of Tressel’s most prominent players (including Terrelle Pryor) to miss the Sugar Bowl. At the time, this decision did make sense. The procedure called for for those specific types of infractions means that when the infraction is discovered can dramatically change the severity of the punishment for the very same action.

An infraction that happens in April which is discovered and reported in the off-season could lead to a five game suspension to start the season. Though not always, this is typically where a school will play the weakest part of its schedule. That same infraction taking place in April but being discovered at the end of October has the potential to place key players out for the most important games of the year.

It seems merciful that an infraction discovered before the terminal — and potentially the most important — game of the season could have the penalty postponed because you presume that the institution brought the infraction to the attention of the NCAA at such an inconvenient time out of a sense of obligation and fair-play, despite it potentially costing an important game.

When it comes to light some months later that the institution actually knew² all along and only reported the violation because their hand was forced, it takes a lot of wind out of the argument that the suspension should have been delayed as it was out of a sense of fairness.

The NCAA Bylaw in question here is 10.1, which John Infante (of Bylaw Blog fame) tells us “the most important rule in the NCAA.” It prohibits a wide range of unethical conduct not limited to the examples provided in the text. Among those examples are many including providing false information to the NCAA or withholding evidence from them in an investigation.

As Sports Illustrated’s Stewart Mandel writes: “[H]e broke a rule. End of story. The ‘extenuating circumstances’ Ohio State is trotting out in his defense are simply not believable.”

Certainly Tressel himself deserves some specific punishment — the coaching suspension and fine are good examples of that — but as he is the most visible and public face of OSU, the institution itself bears responsibility too. I’m not clear on if there would actually be grounds to rule the players retroactively ineligible based on the lack of action taken by a coach, but at the very least Ohio State — by way of their head coach — knew or should have known that there were players on the team who had received improper benefits.

Whether or not it comes to pass is another issue, but the the 2010 Ohio State season needs to be wiped off of the record books — in addition to more harsh personal sanctions for Tressel — to send a message to coaches that ignoring infractions won’t make them go away.

• This post’s featured image is ‘Sab gets another tattoo‘ by Flickr user crazyoctopus.

1. Another interesting tidbit from that document: The Department of Justice apparently notifies schools of possible infractions. I wonder how long that’s been going on.
2. If we can’t say the institution knows something when the head football coach — the school’s most highly paid employee — knows something, when can we?

Look, I get it. Football, it’s a testicle thing. It’s a testosterone driven sport. It’s about hard charging offenses and tough as nails defenses and incredible athletes doing their best to demolish the other fellow and “make his ass quit.” It’s explosive and violent and incredibly manly. And me and my ovaries love it.

When I say that I love college football, I don’t just mean that I wear my team’s gear when it matches my nail polish and appreciate the tight fit of those uniform pants (though I do). I mean I love college football like Lee Corso loves fuzzy mascot heads (or Kirk Herbstreit loves mirrors).

I start the countdown to the college football season kickoff game as soon as the clock hits 0:00 in the national championship contest. I can name all the SEC schools by division, their coaches, and the stadiums and towns in which they play. I get goosebumps when a QB times his cadence just right and draws the defense offsides. I’m the girl at the table that uses all available flatware, s&p shakers and Tabasco bottles to diagram for my dinner companions the right way to execute a blitz, and how it’s named after the German Blitzkrieg lightning-fast attacks because if you don’t get to the QB quick enough you leave him with most of his receivers wide open on an empty field. I’ve been late to work on Friday because the crappy Pac-10 Thursday night game ran long and I stayed up to watch it.

Results from a cursory Google search for “female college football fans” rewarded me with plenty of playboy-esque images of girls not-quite-clothed clothed in various jerseys and this little marketing research brief which proves by it’s very existence that women are a large part of the overall fanbase.  If the marketers have deemed us a viable demographic, it’s time to start paying attention.

So come on, random stranger guy…you can do better. I know you’ve probably been burned by those pretty girls who pretended to love your team just because you do, who carefully studied your reactions so they’d know when to cheer and listened to you patiently explain what that yellow line is all about. But don’t judge the rest of us by their sins. I am here to tell you, on behalf of good football-loving women everywhere, we are just as devoted to our teams as you are to yours. Maybe even more so. Because while you focus on the things we all commonly appreciate — the hard hits, the perfectly executed out routes, the exhilaration of watching your team win, I get the added appreciation of both those tight fitting pants AND the athletes within them, and I get to do it in matchy nail polish.

Services help procure game video, transcripts, grade-point averages, test scores, accurate height and weight, addresses and phone numbers.

A national package could include a region, a select group of states, depending on the service.

But it all starts with the game video.

Gilmore said that too often UO, and other college programs, would request tape from a high school and receive only a few games. Through a package, Gilmore said, UO could get a player’s entire junior season and then also be able to watch opposing teams to scout additional players.

It’s easy to read a couple of headlines and determine that of course Oregon shouldn’t be paying for these services, right? We’ve all learned that any time a school makes the news for paying for anything, they’ve probably crossed a line somewhere, right? If this is actually legal, it shouldn’t be, and that’s a loophole that should be closed up right away.

Not so fast, my friend.

If you give in to the knee-jerk reaction to declare the practice illegal, what’s left for the schools? Are they resigned to only recruiting players from cooperative (read: large) high schools and/or schools near by? Do they have to find a way to employ their own army of videographers to scour the country looking for America’s Next Top Recruit?

Major programs aren’t going to just resign themselves to rising and falling on the strength of their state or region’s crop of recruits. If we’re conscious of the spending that an institution has to devote to compete at an elite level in football, and it’s something we don’t want to inflate needlessly, this is an issue that requires a bit more thought.

There are other options. One is to have the NCAA take over the process entirely. You want game film on a prospective student athlete? It’ll come from the NCAA’s video clearinghouse. That department’s job will be to collect game film and organize it in a way that universities can find what they want and have it on demand. This would, of course, be a massive undertaking. Schools who go make their own film or acquire it through other means could be required to submit that film to the clearinghouse.

That option puts more power in the hands of the NCAA and provides a central point of failure.

Another approach is to simply forbid schools from signing contracts with scouting services that have any individual contact with the recruits. How will a university know whether or not a scouting service is breaking that rule? They’ll have to trust the scouting service to be honest with them and follow the NCAA’s rules. If we could trust scouting services to do that, there wouldn’t be a problem to solve at all.

A rule change of this nature might have the benefit of making infractions easier to prove, but it also might just force scouting services to erect elaborate corporate structures to provide the appearance of separation. That’s not to say that these issues can’t be solved within the rule itself¹, but the idea is to make the proof easier, not more complicated. If nothing else, you can say that it will make catching the dumb rule-breakers easier.

An analogous exercise can be done on the other side of the issue as well, talking about the services that help prospective recruits get their names out. The goal would be for the rule to proscribe undesirable behavior without casting a net so wide that innocuous behavior is forbidden as well. That gets tricky — if you’re not careful, you could end up with a rule where FedEx gets labelled as a street agent because it ships so many game films to coaches.

Even if you were to manage to separate those two groups, you still have the possibility for trouble at their nexus: street agents and scouting services would quickly develop working relationships², and it wouldn’t take long for positive or negative opinions of coaches and recruiters to filter from scouting services to street agents down to recruits.

That’s not to suggest that there’s no way forward or that the rules are as perfect as it is possible for them to be, but to emphasize that the solution that balances the interests of all of the parties is not an easy one to achieve.

1. If it walks like a street agent and quacks like a street agent…
2. They’d also quickly develop business relationships if the rules permitted them to do so.

According to public invoices (see here and here) obtained by Yahoo! Sports, Oregon paid more than $28,000 to two men with personal ties to current Ducks for “recruiting services” – specifically, video of potential prospects. Recruiting services are common and legal (see below), but if either of the recipients in this case is determined to have had a role in a prospects’ recruitment, he could be classified as a booster and bring significant heat from the NCAA.

As one might expect, this has not gone unnoticed and virtually every major college football blog is talking about that report this morning¹. The short-form headlines are much more damning — typically insinuating that Oregon was paying for recruits — than the current state of the facts, but it’s not as simple as it might initially appear.

The meat of the issue lies in capitalism. In order for recruits to have their highlights seen by the largest number of college programs, specialized businesses were formed to promote players to the Universities. These sorts of services range from simple video formatting and mail distribution to phone calls to the recruiters for the various schools. It makes sense: this is a path that the students have likely not traveled before, and having a sherpa to guide them through the treacherous passes that abound — and to help them sort fact from marketing — is a valuable service well worth a family’s hard-earned money.

Similarly, prep recruiting services specialize in evaluating and reporting on high school athletes. They achieve a breadth of coverage that the University’s themselves cannot due to a mixture of time, money, and NCAA recruiting rules. It also turns out that ravenous college football fans are consuming more and more recruiting news to sate their hunger in the off-season, making it a doubly-lucrative business venture.

It doesn’t take Warren Buffet to find out what comes next: since these two businesses each serve different ends of the same information channel, and both ends of that channel are willing to open their checkbooks, it stands to reason that one could potentially increase profit by serving both client-bases. If you assume that the interests of the schools and recruits are not in conflict, that everyone plays fair, and that the businesses can adequately fulfill both sets of duties, there really shouldn’t be a problem with any of this.

The operative word there is “shouldn’t”.

In reality, not all of these “services” are equal, and with so little oversight of this specific piece of the process, there’s a huge margin for unfair dealing. For less-desired recruits, this might not be such a big issue, but all it takes to see how this arrangement can create perverse motives is to imagine the #1 recruit in the country signing up with one of these scouting services. Will the recruiting service be able to eliminate its bias if some of the recruit’s suitors are his clients and some are not? Even if it can, can anything be done to eliminate the opportunity for, or appearance of, impropriety here?

From what little we know about the specific case in question, there’s not enough to start counting up Oregon’s sanctions. Hell, the university’s own take on it is: “Yeah, we did that, so what?” In fact, this could be less about Oregon specifically and more a case of the NCAA starting to wade into this morass in an effort to prevent NCAA Football recruiting from turning into shadiness that is NCAA Basketball recruiting.

If it turns out that the services Oregon paid steered the recruits toward the Ducks, they could be in a whole heap of trouble, but until there’s more evidence that that is the case, I’m more inclined to believe that this is an attempt by the NCAA to survey the landscape of CFB recruiting in advance of legislative proposals or other administrative action.

• This post’s featured image is ‘Duck‘ by Flickr user Charles Haynes.

1. Just a sampling: Addicted to Quack, Dr. Saturday, SI.com, Maize n Brew, Double-T Nation, and Roll Bama Roll