OT: Alabama assistant allegedly advised recruit to transfer HS to get "eligible"
Alabama assistant Jeremy Pruitt allegedly pushed one of Alabama's 2013 recruits to transfer from Pensacola, FL to Foley HS in Alabama because they "could take care of him academically." The recruit actually transferred to Foley yesterday for his senior year right after fall football camp started. Pruitt worked together with Foley HS head coach Todd Watson at Hoover HS in the 2000s. In order for him to be eligible to play football this year, his entire family had to move to Foley (Alabama) school district from Florida. I'm sure this is all on the up and up.
http://www.pnj.com/article/20120807/SPORTS/308070030/Foley-bound
I think we are going to end up seeing a lot more of this in the future with the looming changes in the NCAA eligibility requirements in 2016. If you haven't heard about these changes, this ESPN article breaks it down pretty well:
Some schools or handlers are going to start pushing borderline recruits to transfer earlier in HS to feeder high schools to get them eligible through shady grades.
This Alabama assistant coached at Hoover HS when it was involved in an academic fraud case involving unauthorized grade changes and pressuring teachers on grades for their athletes. Is this assistant more likely to help steer a recruit to a place with better education standards (that may or may not make it more likely to be eligible) or a school that is going to bend rules and inflate grades to get the recruit eligible?
And I don't understand how a better education gets a kid eligible in his senior year. Dropping a kid from community college into an Ivy League school is not going to get the student better grades. Better teachers may be able to help the student get better grades with time, but I highly doubt that process would involve him taking a higher credit load (6 credits to now 8 credits) and able to be done in less than a year.
You keep glossing over the only past history we have so far in this Alabama assistant's profile: he was on a high school football staff that was involved in academic fraud. It's easy to twist help into academic fraud when you were ALREADY involved in academic fraud. Much easier than twisting one of Alabama football's feeder schools into an academic powerhouse with special needs tutors that will allow a problem student to achieve at a higher level while taking a heavier credit load.
What good is college if the student is not prepared to take advantage of it? What service is that actually providing the student besides an opportunity to play college football?
Regarding being prepared - you have no evidence that this move will NOT help him become better prepared. All you have is a belief that since this particular assistant was involved with something untoward in the past that he just HAS to be doing it again.
But there is a higher degree of suspicion when someone who commits a wrong in the past is now suspected of same crime in the present. I don't get how you can shrug off a past history of academic fraud when suspected of allegations of academic fraud. I don't see how hard that is to see.
If a person with a history of armed robbery is caught at the scene of a potential robbery with a gun wouldn't that person be the prime suspect?
Prime suspect? Maybe. Inadmissible at trial? Almost certainly.
for anything that links Pruitt with Hoovers academic problems?
Ill wait.
I see no problem with helping a kid attend college and pursue college athletics. It may seem shady or unfair... but realistically so are the societal issues and disadvantages that a lot of kids face. (Not saying that's the case here.
But at the end of the day another kid going to school and playing college ball is good for the student and essentially harms no one else.
Fail. :(
assistant coach is heading down a slippery slope. It starts by moving recruits to a different school where they may get preferential treatment with grades. Next thing we know the assistant coach is clubbing hobos which as we all know eventually ends with five dead hookers. We have all seen this before.........
Allegedly* killing five hookers.
Who is downvoting a post that doesn't see a problem with kids getting help attending college?
There are some wierdos on the internet boy I tell ya...
Pretty sure its your handle.
I don't think it's that because I've had numerous upvoted posts etc. But maybe you're on to something.
Couple things. First I want to say I hope the best for the young man and hopefully he will be able to become eligible through tutoring or greater engagement.
I looked around the Hoover HS / District website and I didn't find the EOG and violence disclosure metrics that are commonly posted at least in NC. If someone can find these and compare them to school in Pensecola it might provide some insight into the kind of help he will be getting.
With all of the litigation going around, and the blatant cheating by multi-million dollar businesses disguised as "athletic departments," I can't see the NCAA lasting in its present form for more than about five years, or maybe as many as seven.
Sooner or later, they are going to have to just admit that they are a business that exploits employees who don't even get to call themselves employees, and that they have as much to do with education as an order of french fries does with France.
Considering how many players major in "eligibility" and either don't finish degrees or get worthless ones, why should they even require students to go to class? Why not just drop all pretense and hire well-paid football players to represent "their" schools?
The NCAA needs to decide whether they are all about the money or all about the ideals for which they pound the bully pulpit. As it stands now, they are about whatever benefits the administrators who run the NCAA and its member schools want the most.
Most of all, the NCAA's true "mission" has nothing to do with the welfare of any "student-athlete."
From what I've been able to gather about this "story", is that our coach instructed him to change schools in order to get out of a piss poor academic environment. Foley is known for working with "inner city" (pc) type athletes who are not academic world beaters and giving them the assistance they need to make the grades. This is not a situation where his new HS is going to fabricate grades or cheat, but simply give him appropriate academic assistance. The HS coach reported it beacuse this isn't the first time, and he's sick of losing athletes to other highschools. However, his HS has a reputation of producing talented, yet ineligle athletes, because of their piss-poor academics. Also, Foley HS is on the block schedule, which means he can earn 8 credits in the same time as he could earn 6 at the other school. The Bama fanbase thinks there is no story here. Choose for yourself.
Bama is starting to give me that slow burning and itching like hemorrhoids. Usually accompanied by the mud butt. Not that I know what that feels like.