SEC
SEC Panders to Oversigning Zealots
If you repeat a lie often enough, people will start to believe it. That’s the story behind Oversigning.com, and the entire class of wannabe analysts who latched on to a red herring1 and ran with it.
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.
- Cook, a Michigan fan, decided “oversigning” was a problem quite conveniently when his team’s head coach needed a distraction [↩]
- I wish I had a dollar for every time a blogger or commenter pretended to know who was on scholarship at a particular school [↩]
