Impact of Miami Hurricane Booster Scandal

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/2011/08/17/1696515/alabama-football-crimson-tide.html

It’s been a little over a month since Yahoo! promised college football fans with a scandal that would they described as a “10”, and on Tuesday, they finally published their story which undoubtedly rocked the college football landscape. Although the Miami Hurricane athletic department still shoulders much of the embarrassment, The Ledger-Enquirer’s Michael Casagrande explains how this scandal might affect other schools such as Alabama. Jeff Scoutland and Joe Pannunzio, two coaches recently hired by Alabama from Miami, were each named by a Miami booster in a report describing multiple recruiting violations. Their future with the University of Alabama is unclear as the university refused to comment on the situation.

Since the booster’s accounts of the rule violations date back to 2002, the scandal branches itself out to other schools via hiring of former UM coaches and even former recruits. Schools like Alabama do not have to worry about direct punishment from the NCAA due to hiring “dirty” coaches because recruiting violations do not follow coaches to different schools. However, it is still a black eye to the schools with these coaches and if the allegations are true then you can expect to see a lot of unemployed coaches within the next few months. After Randy Shannon’s firing last season, the diaspora of former Miami assistants is wide. Florida wide receivers coach Aubrey Hill was also named in Charles Robinson’s Yahoo! report.

But it’s the players that most universities are worried about. Any Miami recruit who received extra benefits loses their amateur status and is ineligible to play collegiate football, regardless whether or not they actually received the money from the school they’re attending. Georgia’s tight-end Orson Charles and Florida’s highly touted Andre Debose and Matt Patchan were all named by Shapiro who described taking recruits to parties and even once paying for an abortion.

I remain skeptical of any scandal allegations without hard evidence backing it up. Just tune-in to the Paul Finebaum show some time and listen to the ridiculous, unsubstantiated claims made each day by a person claiming to have an inside source. This story is still in its infancy, but hopefully we will soon see more named sources, e-mails, phone records, and bank account transcripts which would all be useful information to make the story more credible. It’ll be interesting to see how the situation works itself out as the landscape of college football changes with conference expansion. There couldn’t be a more inconvenient time for this story to break as Miami now has to worry about falling out of the “Big Three” in the state of Florida while Florida State flirts with SEC and has been dominating in-state recruiting of late.

Casagrande does a good job of explaining how this story affects his Alabama’s program. While he couldn’t go very in-depth due to Alabama’s mum stance on the subject, he still brought to light the impact Yahoo!’s story could have around the college football world. There isn’t much for him to change as he is simply states facts and leaves it to the reader to imply what sort of punishment, if any, Alabama or any school left with the scraps of the Miami program will receive.