Consider it a Hate Filled Bonus Post

I received the following message (with a link) via email from a man who calls himself USF Brian: “Read this and tear this guy a new asshole, please.”

Okay, then.

aaaaaaaaaaaLower standards help some schools
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaRay Melick

And while the South Florida bandwagon has suddenly become the place to be in college football, rival coaches are not quite as enthusiastic about the success of programs like South Florida, and similarly fast-rising schools like Rutgers and West Virginia.

Two things here: first, Alabama is no rival of USF. In fact, the two teams haven't ever played (Nate's note: reader Kevin pointed out that Alabama kicked our asses four seasons ago, so I am once again wrong here). Second, of course other college coaches aren't enthusiastic about having other good teams in the NCAA. That only makes their jobs tougher. You will never hear anyone say, “Wow, my job is now harder. That's awesome.”

So far, this piece sucks.

Good coaching is part of it. So is commitment to the program. And scholarship limits have spread talent around more evenly.

But those reasons don't explain everything, in particular how some very talented football players are denied admission to some schools but not others.

Ray?may I call you Ray??lemme tell you something: different schools have different academic standards. These standards are not set by the state, by Jesus Christ or by anyone other than the schools themselves and the NCAA (which applies a minimum standard). This is not a conspiracy. It is a decision.

Douche.

“The distribution of players is not the same for everybody,” said Alabama head coach Nick Saban. “There's a significant amount of players who don't qualify (at some schools) and they end up being pretty good players at some other schools. I think there are six guys starting on South Florida's defense who probably could have gone to Florida or Florida State but Florida and Florida State couldn't take them. And if you do a good job of recruiting that way …”

So, let me get this straight. Nick Saban, the coach who basically fucked the entire city of Miami over by bailing like a dead hooker over a guardrail, is talking about advocating fairness. This is like me criticizing someone for having a beer with lunch.

And by the way, since we're clearly in shit talking mode, once Hall of Fame coach Don Shula was asked if he thought Nick Saban was “a raging fraud?”

Shula's answer: “What other conclusion can you draw? The guy likes to hear himself talk and then doesn't follow up on what he says.”

Fuck Nick Saban.

Oh, and while we're here, “of [South Florida's] 110 players, two are non-qualifiers and only one is a starter.”

Nick Saban is either stupid or he's a liar.

Saban stopped there, but the implication is obvious: If you recruit that way you get players that are good enough to elevate a program in a hurry.

Which really is what you want to do, right? The goal is to elevate the program in a hurry, right? Am I the only asshole here or is it the other way around?

At issue is the difference in admission policies from school to school, which may be more stringent than the minimum standards established by the NCAA.

Or, they may not be. Totally up to the school, dickhead.

Prior to 2003 the NCAA required incoming freshmen to have scored at least an 820 on the SAT or an 18 on the ACT, plus have a grade point average of 2.5 in a predetermined number of “core” classes.

But protests brought about a change to the current “sliding scale,” which allowed for higher test scores to compensate for lower GPA, or vice versa. The slide can be dramatic: A 3.55 GPA makes a 400 SAT score – basically what you get for signing your name – acceptable under NCAA rules.

How many of you people know someone with a 400 SAT and a 3.55 GPA? I don't think there are enough horny high school teachers out there to make that happen.

The coaches who benefit from this say that such an extreme difference in GPA and test score is very rare. But the people who work in NCAA compliance say it happens more than you might think.

So the fuck what?

What concerns coaches is that some schools appear to be willing to admit athletes based on the NCAA minimum, while other schools hold their athletes to standards that are higher than the NCAA minimum, creating a very real advantage-disadvantage in recruiting.

Who's pointing the gun to Alabama's collective head here? You want to recruit, lower your goddamn standards. Alabama's been sanctioned for doing worse.

(USF has never been sanctioned.)

Conferences such as the SEC have pushed for legislation that would increase the NCAA's minimum standards, but so far that move has been voted down by schools that argue admission standards should be left up to individual institutions.

So basically, here's the deal. The NCAA has decided that the world needs to educate dumbasses, too. So you can decide?let me stress this?you can DECIDE to raise your standards above the minimum. And if you do so, it should follow that you have lost the right to bitch. If you want to level the playing field in recruiting, quit being snobs about the minimum requirements and join in the fun. If not, you do not get to bitch. This is what happens when you make a conscious decision based on the facts, fuckhead. You get to live with the results.

“It is what it is,” Saban said. “I feel like if we do a good job of recruiting here, we ought to be able to get good football players who are qualified who are the kind of people, character and attitude-wise, that we want to represent an institution like this. And we know that there are going to be some occasions that we have to play against some teams that don't have to do that.

He added, “I'm Nick Saban and I'm a fucking crybaby. Boo hoo! How ever will I win in Alabama if I have to have players with decent SAT scores on my team? I think I'll go coach LSU 'cause I'm a ship jumping, backstabbing, shit talking asshole with no morality or sense of dignity.”

“I'm glad, on the other hand, for the players, that they have an opportunity to get an education. … So there's good and bad, I guess, in all of it.”

Oh, how nice of you Saban. You think that a school being willing to educate someone for free provides both good and bad. The good is that the kid gets an education. The bad is that the kid doesn't get to play for you. Seems to me like the “bad” here would only be bad for you. You crybaby.

Flexible admissions standards are the truly great equalizer in creating parity in athletics.

As for what it means in the classroom – each school has to answer that for itself.

Umm, I think it means that kids who are otherwise denied an education by snobby elitist assholes (who incidentally, not content with hurting a kid's future by denying him education, feel they have to add to the bullshit by complaining about the fact that another school got him) can still play for a major college team at a major university. Which, last time I checked, yields better citizens than does the alternative (drug dealing, minimum wage slaves, etc.).

Umm, waiter, table for two: It's Ray Melick and Nick Saban. They'll have the usual: one cake to have and one to eat.

Assholes.

Ray Melick's column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Write him at rmelick@bhamnews.com and let him know he sucks.

Please.

Come on. For me?

Okay fine. Be that way.