SEC is on the decline. Don't worry about them. They lost control of FB national title to ACC, and AAC has both of the BB titles. just need someone else to win Baseball title and they are shut out of all that matters.

This isn't "reporting" anything. It sounds like he just published the script to the movie Blue Chips.

How many players have stepped forward as whistleblowers in the past 10 years? 5 guys? 10? Certainly not more than that. In that time there's been almost 20,000 basketball/football athletes recruited by P5/ Big East schools. In a world where 80% of NFL players declare bankruptcy within 5 years of retiring, I find it hard to believe that they'd all keep quiet. If you're on the payroll once, you have to stay on it for a long, long time. The consequences to the school are so high if it's made public that the threat of blackmail is powerful.

And the coaches? They're in a cutthroat industry. If they see an advantage, they seize it. They'd all have to be kept on the payroll for the rest of their lives. We're talking millions and millions per year after all assistants are accounted for. And they'd all have to be dirty rotten bastards, and good at keeping secrets, every last one of them, because I've never seen any coach admit to this.

Look, I have no doubt that this goes on sometimes. I'd even agree on top of what we see in the news, it's not farfetched that right now half the P5 schools have a couple players that are getting a couple thousand $$ in extra benefits, and probably a couple of schools have a full-blown scandal ready to burst. But if "everyone" did it, the total payrolls for each school would have to exceed NFL payrolls by 2 or 3 times to keep the number of media stories so low.

As a universal truth, if a conspiracy theory requires tens of thousands of people to be dirty rotten bastards who are good at keeping secrets, it's probably not true. The reality is that when paying players becomes systemic, someone squeals and the school gets hit hard (see Miami, SMU, USC). Just think of the number of schools that have never gotten caught paying players, and that should give you a better idea of how often this really occurs.

It's all about the student athlete, right?

(04-14-2014 09:15 AM)goodknightfl Wrote:  SEC is on the decline. Don't worry about them. They lost control of FB national title to ACC, and AAC has both of the BB titles. just need someone else to win Baseball title and they are shut out of all that matters.

Keep trying to convince yourself of that...