Here’s Billy’s latest take on conference realignment, with an eye toward the big decision as to whether Missouri should move to the SEC or stay in the Big 12.
By Billy Reed
As a player, coach, parent, student, alum or just plain fan, this is the best of times to be involved with the Trinity High School football program. Even with six – six! – KHSAA classes, the Shamrocks are in a class by themselves. They are well on their way to an unbeaten – no, make that unchallenged — season that may stamp them as the best high school team ever produced in Kentucky.
Heading into Friday night’s game at Male, the Rocks have cracked the Top 10 of some national rankings. They have a bunch of big-time college prospects, mostly in the junior class, but they also have the discipline, motivation, and execution that happens when good coaching intersects with intelligent players.
But take a snapshot of them as they are now because the worst of times may be coming. Already the Trinity stars – James Quick, Travis Wright, Dalyn Dawkins, Garrett Sauer, and others – are being idolized as rock stars by the young Catholic kids who mob them for autographs before and after games at Marshall Stadium.
But that kind of adulation, fanned by media hype, is relatively harmless compared with the sinister specter of the recruiters who represent, either legally or illegally, the universities who covet the Trinity players as commodities necessary to perpetuate the disgraced state of big-time college football.
If these individuals are allowed to get their hooks into the players, nothing good will come of it. Harmony could be replaced by dissension, unselfishness by jealousy, honesty by deceit. Sad as is to contemplate, the truth is that many universities have sold out academic integrity, not to mention business integrity, for the sake of money, money, and more money.
These are not the values the Trinity players are being taught by their coaches, their teachers, or their pastors. But they are the values that predominate in big-time college sports. As Exhibit A, consider the recent orgy of conference “realignment” (a nice word for pure greed) that has, at bottom, absolutely nothing to do with the welfare of the student-athlete and EVERYTHING to do with money.
The recruiting vultures probably are already doing their dirty work, behind the scenes, using their cell phones and Facebook accounts and Tweets to worm their way into the lives of the players and their families. I’d guess that in the next 15 months, riding herd on these guys will be more challenging for Coach Bob Beatty and his staff than diagramming plays.
It’s gotten to the point that instead of being partners with high schools in education, many universities condone, tacitly or otherwise, unethical practices that make them the enemies of what the high schools are trying to teach.
Big-time recruiting is a cesspool, folks, and it’s loaded with sharks. It can corrupt even the best of programs quicker than you can say, “Jim Tressell.” It’s gotten so that the dishonorable programs outnumber the honorable ones by a wider margin that Trinity beat St. Xavier this season.
It’s hardly a surprise that the University of Miami and Auburn have been involved in controversies because cheating is what they do. It’s in their DNA. But where it used to be an honor to be recruited by Ohio State, Southern Cal, and Tennessee, now those programs are so scandal-ridden it will take them years to recover.
If I were the parent of a Trinity player who had the potential to play big-time college football, I’d also eliminate the universities whose presidents, chancellors and athletics directors have revealed themselves to be disloyal and deceitful during the realignment orgy. I’m talking mainly about Syracuse, Pittsburgh, and Texas A&M. Would you really want your son to attend a university where the leaders are so lacking in character?
And it should go without saying that players and parents should immediately disqualify any program which has any association with flesh peddlers such as “Worldwide Wes,” the basketball leech who ingratiates himself with players from poor economic backgrounds and then guides them to a university where he has a cozy, but murky, relationship with the head coach.
So is there any university out there that can be trusted to adhere to the values the Trinity players are learning from their coaches and teachers? Yes. And considering that Trinity is a Catholic high school, it should be pointed out that Notre Dame, rebuilding under Brian Kelly, is high on the list of universities who still recognizes the importance of academics and doing things the right way.
Of course, there are others who have managed to belong to BCS conferences without sullying their reputations as citadels of higher education. I’m talking about
Stanford, Penn State, Vanderbilt, Duke, Northwestern, Wake Forest, TCU, and BYU.
I also think Charlie Strong and Joker Phillips run clean programs at Louisville and Kentucky, respectively. However, I’m concerned about the U of L assistant Clint Hurtt’s well-documented involvement in the Miami scandal and Strong’s cavalier attitude toward it. I’m also hoping that Phillips doesn’t get so desperate at UK that he asks basketball coach John Calipari to introduce him to “Worldwise Wes.”
Speaking of Calipari, did you see that he again intruded on football season, but this time in a way that wasn’t to his liking? The news broke last week that he and Derrick Rose, who did a one-and-done year for him at Memphis, had paid off some Tiger ticket holders to forestall a lawsuit?
The ticket-holders argued that since the NCAA had vacated Memphis’s wins during Rose’s Final Four freshman season, and ruled the player ineligible for his because of academic fraud (somebody took his college entrance for him), the athletics department sold them tickets under false pretenses and, therefore, owed them a refund.
Although the arguments are spurious, at best, Calipari and Rose agreed to pony up a few hundred thousand just to make the suit go away. Maybe that’s an admission of guilt, and maybe it’s not, but it’s typical of the smarmy stuff going on the recruiting cesspool.
But I digress.
The university that intrigues me now is Missouri. Personally, I’ve always liked Missouri as a state because it gave the world both Harry Truman and Stan Musial. As for the university, it has one of the nation’s best journalism schools, which makes it A-OK in my book, and its football and men’s basketball teams have generally avoided major scandals while producing the occasional championship contender.
But now Missouri is on the hot seat. Should it do the right thing and stay in the Big 12 Conference? Or should it follow Texas A&M out of that league and into the SEC? The university’s board of trustees has empowered the chancellor to evaluate the situation and make a decision based on “the best interests of the university.”
Well, we know a move to the SEC is not in the best interests of the student athletes, who would have to spend more time traveling. We know a move to the SEC is not in the best interest of the fans, who would have to give up the traditional rivalries they love in order to spend more money to travel to new and more remote places. We know it’s not in best interest of higher education, considering that Vandy is the only SEC school that’s more academically respected than anybody in the Big 12.
So cut aside all the high-minded verbiage and it all boils down to – surprise, surprise! – money. If Missouri can make significantly more dough by following Texas A&M to the SEC, they’ll probably do it. Unless, of course, the Missouri chancellor shocks the world by declaring the college athletics is about more than money at his institution and that the Tigers will make a stand for loyalty and stick with his longtime rivals and partners in the Big 12.
Would that be refreshing or what? It would be so counter to the culture of big-time college athletics that high school student-athletes everywhere, including Trinity, could look Missouri with a new kind of respect.
For the sake of all concerned, I hope the Trinity High football team fulfills its destiny, whatever it might be, without interference from scumbag recruiters and flesh-peddling “street agents.” I hope the players have taken to heart the values they’re taught daily by their coaches and teachers.
But the temptations will be there, rest assured. And if, indeed, it takes a village to raise a child, it will take everybody connected with Trinity to make sure the players don’t get sucked into the cesspool that we call big-time college recruiting.
