Alabama Anger

Read any of his responses to comments. He always snaps at them, repeats his argument, and tries to make it seem like they are idiots for bringing up a legitimate argument, and then not elaborating to give an answer.

he doesnt really offer any rebuttal. he just references some newspaper (which i didnt bother to read) that says alabama has 82 scholarship players. the rest of the article just claims that this was a conspiracy by michigan to overshadow the richrod thing and that nick saban is an infallible scholarship-managing genius

makes straw man arguments. 

<i>It is, in fact, the results that matter. </i>

so, in the SEC, the ends do justify the means? i'm glad that's clear now.

<i>The academic scholarship I had in college required me to keep a certain GPA.</i>

weak analogy... a slightly less weak analogy: say you needed a 3.0 to keep the s'ship. after your FR year, you get a 3.22 but the U found a few kids w/ better HS transcripts/SATs and thus thought had more potential to excel than you had shown after a year on campus. you did not violate the terms of your agreement for renewal (3.22 > 3.0), but come June the U pulls your $$$ to make room for the new guys.

and there is still the hypothetical.... what if these guys who left for various reasons did stay on? what happens w/ those FR who signed a binding guarantee to play at Bama this year (a LOI)? did Saban give a guarantee back to the recruits back in DEC-FEB? if so, that's obviously disingenuous. if he did level with many of them, the situation is nonetheless NOT an even playing field recruit-to-program.

so, yea it's buyer beware to some extent. another flawed analogy: say if you commit to buy an xbox360(bama s'ship) in a store at which it isn't in stock yet. 2-3 months later the store says the xbox (the s'ship) doesn't arrive for a year. you are stuck having to wait w/ nothing b/c you can't get your money back to buy one on ebay. sure, you could have gone to another store and bought a colecovision (auburn s'ship) day-of, but that doesn't make the xbox agreement anymore fair. you may have had full knowledge of the terms, but it doesn't mean the contract shouldn't be made more fair for the consumer (recruit).

finally, the off-hand RR comment is evidence that RR was the catalyst for Brian's article? you're reading b/t the lines way too much to be making character judgments. IOW, you're assigning intent based on questionable assumptions. it was pretty clear that the intent was not to deflect blame (like Mgoblog is part of the UM AD PR dept), nor was it to say, Saban=Satan, lolz bamma = cheaters! it was an attempt to address an actual issue in CFB, in contrast to the non-issues the MSM/everyone addressed WRT RR. but here i am assuming brian's intent when i could...

<i>I only wrote the thing on Saban because of the Gayle article that drew a picture of severe oversigning even when you take most of the reasonable departures into account. This is a general hobby-horse of mine.

Any anger you've seen about this thing is a reaction to the ludicrous excess and, frankly, overwhelming stupidity of most of the responses .</i>
http://mgoblog.com/content/final-word-oversigning-and-alabama

so there is his intent in his own words. if you want to call him a liar, fine.... settle that w/ him.

Seems to me Holiday is implying that it's good practice to oversign and therefore perfectly normal.  Not a whole lot of schools do, and those that do are ones with pretty stellar reputations ('Bama, Miami, etc.)

I see he also has yet to address, and probably never will address, Brian's actual point, which is obviously that oversigning puts you in the position to root for misfortune.  I suppose Holiday would say that you need to plan ahead for said misfortune, which is why the NCAA allows walk-ons.