"the cam newton situation is not isolated"


i spent the first four hours of our drive home today listening to sports talk radio. over the course of any given week, the more sports talk you listen to, the more nauseating it can be. however, monday mornings on the national shows are usually the exception to that rule. why? well, in the three hour slots the shows have to fill, they have to breakdown and analyze anything and everything important that happened in the world of sports since they signed off sometime friday before lunch. i flipped back and forth this morning between mike and mike and colin cowherd on espn and dan patrick's nationally syndicated show. between the sports talk and the girls being really, really good, the first two-thirds of the trip actually kind of zipped by.

the most interesting segment, to me, came from dan patrick. one of the many topics covered, naturally, was the heisman trophy presentation and the coronation of cam on saturday night. the fact that newton won the award wasn't what was interesting. if you'd been paying attention to heismanpundit.com since midseason, you'd have already known the result. what was interesting about the heisman segment was the story dan patrick told about a conversation he had saturday night with a college recruiter/coach from "outside the sec" that was also from a perennial top 25 program. patrick said they talked recruiting shop for close to an hour over dinner and the recruiter told him that once a "kid" was drawing interest from sec schools, his program then proceeded to back off from the recruit because they couldn't "compete with the sec when it came to "resources". the "resources" in question, patrick went on to explain, were not facilities or academics or even readying the athlete for the pros. the "resources", of course, was money. lots and lots of money. the coach told patrick that the sec is "on a different level" in a lot of ways. one of those ways, he suggested, was due to the fact that "the cam newton situation was not an isolated incident."

naw. you don't say?

make note, the conversation that patrick was retelling had nothing to do with cam newton, other than his was the situation that sparked the convo, but everything to do with the big business of college football.

it was pure coincidence, of course, that smu's story of fraud/exploitation/profiteering played immediately after the heisman ceremony on espn. the program had been scheduled for that saturday for months, i am sure. the irony was not lost, though. i noted back in my cam newton "to be or not to be" post that my favorite story of recruiting corruption came from that campus and eric dickerson's trans "A&M" (he showed up at smu with a trans am that he claimed his grandmother bought him. later it came out texas a&m boosters had purchased the car for him). you would have thought that a sexy, high profile football program being removed from the planet for several years would have served as a cautionary tale. it did not. all that happened is that it drove the crookedness further underground, where it then went on to include shady characters like logan young and kenny rogers and whatever name that runner for this guy that works for that agent goes by these days.

what tickled my ear's fancy the most this morning was patrick saying, specifically, that the recruiter wasn't calling the sec's five star athletes out as sour grapes. he didn't see the athletes the sec schools could afford as athletes that weren't "good enough" or "a good fit" or "right" for his program. he just couldn't get them. he didn't have the "resources". so, he had to forget about them and move on to less expensive options. "it is what it is".

you can talk about what a "winner" or "fine young man" cam newton is all you want. me? i could wax rhapsodic for three more years about how julio jones changed my life. i am convinced he's most likely the best human ever. none of us really know otherwise, right? that's what i've been reminded of so many times with regards to the most recent scandal, hasn't it? "how do you know?" "where are your facts?" "who told you this?"

and "they" are right. i don't know much. about anything. but there are people that do. i listen to them.

can we all just admit, then, that conferences and schools that can afford to pay their assistants more than the average nfl coordinator (and that's not even mentioning the head coaches) probably share some of that cash with their recruits/players? is it a proportionate or even fair share? um, no. probably not. but it's something. whether it's literally or figuratively shoved underneath their dorm room door makes no difference in the least.

here's hoping that all of this noise that's made by concerned fans and alum advocating on behalf of athletes being paid above the table pays off somewhere down the road.

until then, i'll continue to bask in the awesomeness that is the sec. thank god i was born and raised an alabama fan. it must suck to root for teams without boosters with deep pockets.