Oversigning (capacity 25, everyone welcome! maybe)

[FCollinsBuckeye]

They are finding ways to squeeze out the healthy & hardworking kids too in order create a competitive advantage by undoing that scholarship. They are erasing that mistake and bringing in a kid with potential and upside.

Sometimes they use bogus medical waivers to reclaim their scholarship. Meat market and other books often talk about how southern schools used to take a kids tutor away so he would flunk out. Sometimes they just plain cut them. Bama is the worst in this area.

There's a saying in recruiting, it's not the ones you miss on that kill you, it's the ones you get. Because when you take a kid on a scholarship, unless he starts dealing weed or stops going to class, you are stuck with him for at least 4 years. In big ten country, sometimes schools will not extend a 5th year scholarship to a redshirt junior who is not contributing.

When you know you can find a way to squeeze out a sophomore who is sliding lower on the depth chart, you can take more risks with what players you offer, both in quantity and in type of prospect. You can take on a high risk, high reward project, and if it doesn't work out, you can get that scholarship back after 1-3 years and try another prospect. That's an incredibly huge advantage achieved at the expense of the kid

Excellent summation of the 'oversigning advantage'.

 

[TheIronColonel]

Makes me wonder why recruits don't simply ask coaches to sign a legally binding LOI. If my son were being recruited, it's simply a matter of asking the coach what kind of commitment he will make to my boy; once the lip service "we value all of our athletes" BS pours out, why not just say "Thanks coach, I appreciate that. Would you please sign this contract that confirms your commitment to that effect?". It really feels as though coaches are simply preying on the naivety of some high school kids. That's pretty fucking low.

 

[BuckTwenty]

Nutri, these schools aren't just cutting malcontents or slackers. Every school has those. James Scott was shown the door (and ended up at Ole Miss, briefly, IIRC) for completely abandoning his responsibilities in practice and workouts (it wasn't talent).

They are finding ways to squeeze out the healthy & hardworking kids too in order create a competitive advantage by undoing that scholarship. They are erasing that mistake and bringing in a kid with potential and upside.

Sometimes they use bogus medical waivers to reclaim their scholarship. Meat market and other books often talk about how southern schools used to take a kids tutor away so he would flunk out. Sometimes they just plain cut them. Bama is the worst in this area.

There's a saying in recruiting, it's not the ones you miss on that kill you, it's the ones you get. Because when you take a kid on a scholarship, unless he starts dealing weed or stops going to class, you are stuck with him for at least 4 years. In big ten country, sometimes schools will not extend a 5th year scholarship to a redshirt junior who is not contributing.


When you know you can find a way to squeeze out a sophomore who is sliding lower on the depth chart, you can take more risks with what players you offer, both in quantity and in type of prospect. You can take on a high risk, high reward project, and if it doesn't work out, you can get that scholarship back after 1-3 years and try another prospect. That's an incredibly huge advantage achieved at the expense of the kid

SPOT on. GPA worthy.

Do you have a link to each schools scholarship breakdown by class, or did you just do the numbers for these two schools on your own?

Oversigning.com is tracking both LSU and Alabama very closely, as they have been two of the biggest name schools partaking in oversigning to a gross degree. The recurits the schools have coming in is from Scout; graduating seniors, incoming greyshirts, and current # of players on the roster are from oversigning.com.

For example, see the entry on 12/16 on oversigning.com for a good look at Alabama situation as of a week ago. Interesting stuff on that website too comparing the recruiting practices of Ohio State and Arkansas, as well as Ohio U. and Troy. Huge differences.

Note that you have to take oversigning.com's stuff with a grain of salt sometimes, because they go to pretty good lengths to make their arguments and tend to leave some things out sometimes that might otherwise make their argument look weaker, but it is very well done.

 

[Dryden]

Makes me wonder why recruits don't simply ask coaches to sign a legally binding LOI. If my son were being recruited, it's simply a matter of asking the coach what kind of commitment he will make to my boy; once the lip service "we value all of our athletes" BS pours out, why not just say "Thanks coach, I appreciate that. Would you please sign this contract that confirms your commitment to that effect?". It really feels as though coaches are simply preying on the naivety of some high school kids. That's pretty fucking low.

This is why you attend all interviews with your kid and impart some parental wisdom to help him identify the Jim Tressels from the Snake Oil Salesmen.

Really, I can't even begin to comprehend what a zoo it must be for a top D1 prospect. When I was 17, all I cared about was eating and fucking.

 

[buckeye78]

SPOT on. GPA worthy.


Oversigning.com is tracking both LSU and Alabama very closely, as they have been two of the biggest name schools partaking in oversigning to a gross degree. The recurits the schools have coming in is from Scout; graduating seniors, incoming greyshirts, and current # of players on the roster are from oversigning.com.

For example, see the entry on 12/16 on oversigning.com for a good look at Alabama situation as of a week ago. Interesting stuff on that website too comparing the recruiting practices of Ohio State and Arkansas, as well as Ohio U. and Troy. Huge differences.

Note that you have to take oversigning.com's stuff with a grain of salt sometimes, because they go to pretty good lengths to make their arguments and tend to leave some things out sometimes that might otherwise make their argument look weaker, but it is very well done.

Interesting links. Thanks for posting. I'll repeat my comments there, here, as someone was talking about MoC as a poster boy for B10 class (mockingly of course)...

Say what you want about Clarett. He made some bad decisions clearly, and has paid for them dearly. What I think is important is the committment to a young man and making him a better person. You can?t always guarantee that a kid keeps it together, on or off the field. What I think is so troubling about this trend is a lack of committment to the student. Clarett made bad decisions, but Tressel and tOSU were committed to helping this kid til it became clear he couldn?t be helped (at the time). Then, after all the untruthful smearing of tOSU by MoC, Tressel still helped Clarett get back into tOSU once he was released. The program didn?t gain anything by this, it simply represents a promise that Tress made to Clarett that he would help him become a better person and following through on that promise. How many promises have been made by these programs, in all conferences, that they didn?t follow through on. Most college players don?t go on to the NFL, and their degree is their future. If it?s my kid, I wanna make sure that the coach and program understand this and follow through on their committment to my son. Failure to do so, for whatever competitive advantage may or may not exist, is deplorable.

 

[Gatorubet]

And the really great this is, if you get your butts handed to you by Arkansas, you'll always have this thread.

 

[Deety]

And the really great this is, if you get your butts handed to you by Arkansas, you'll always have this thread.

And our recruits will have what they were told they would receive. Yeah, I think if the Buckeyes here were making the call, we could live with being able to live with ourselves.

 

[Bill Lucas]

And the really great this is, if you get your butts handed to you by Arkansas, you'll always have this thread.

I'll still be a proud buckeye and proud of the Buckeye way.

 

[NFBuck]

And the really great this is, if you get your butts handed to you by Arkansas, you'll always have this thread.

...and you all can continue to chant "SEC! SEC! SEC!" as another kid's dream is ruined.

 

[Buckeye86]

...and you all can continue to chant "SEC! SEC! SEC!" as another kid's dream is ruined.

on the other hand, is a degree from an SEC school really that much better than being a Phoenix? fucking a kid out of an SEC degree could be considered doing them a favor

 

[buckeyeintn]

I started to reply to Gator and, after reading the 4 posts above mine, what else is there to be said? They are each spot on in their own way. Glad to be a part of a group with this understanding.

 

[stxbuck]

For the APR scoring, a school gets two points per kid, 1 for returning, 1 for being qualified.

From last spring:

Duron Carter nets OSU 0 out of 2.
Thad Gibson nets OSU 1 out of 2 for going pro early.
Cam Heyward nets OSu 2 out of 2 for returning while eligible.

Someone kicked out for grades nets them 0 for 2.

Someone who takes a medical waiver gets at worst a 1 for 2, and perhaps there's an exception for injuries that makes it 2 for 2. That's a navybuck question.

Thad Gibson left w/ a year of eligibility left b/c he RSed. He also graduated last June. Does tOSU still take an APR hit b/c he passed up eligibility, even though he graduated?

 

[cjmik_75]

And the really great this is, if you get your butts handed to you by Arkansas, you'll always have this thread.

Unlike many student-athlete casualties that will result from SEC oversigning, this thread will continue on, regardless the outcome of the Sugar Bowl.

 

[Nutriaitch]

Thad Gibson left w/ a year of eligibility left b/c he RSed. He also graduated last June. Does tOSU still take an APR hit b/c he passed up eligibility, even though he graduated?

my understanding is if he graduated, you get credit for it.
regardless of he left the team early (as long as he was still at OSU).

 

[Gatorubet]

And our recruits will have what they were told they would receive. Yeah, I think if the Buckeyes here were making the call, we could live with being able to live with ourselves.

Nobody is arguing that 80% of your roster should be launched every year if they are not All Big-10, and that launching everybody for any reason is fine.

Oversigning as a practice was obviously worth taking a look at, and had to be a problem in some degree, as the SEC recently put into effect some rules on the subject.

What is not addressed so much is that there are reasons that mitigate/explain some of the numbers that show up in oversigning. Some individual kids are counted as "recruits" two or three times each. A kid signs, can't qualify, goes JUCO, signs again, has some core course issue, signs a third time.

ALL of the oversigning.com stats use this definition:

Oversigning - We define oversigning on this site as the act of accepting more signed letters of intent on National Signing Day then you have room for under the 85 scholarship limit.

When you see a stat comparing the piggies to tOSU, they speak of "almost two recruiting classes more" because they look at the number or recruits "signed" to the respective universities. Put another way, if Arkansas "signed" 50 kids every year, and all but twenty a year failed to academically qualify, Arky would "really" sign 20 qualified, able to enroll guys each year, no matter the number of "signed" letters that were faxed in on signing day in February.

What is not talked about here so much, mostly because it does not fit the narrative of evil, unethical, immoral SEC and coaches all cheating to get a leg up on the Noble, Pure, White-Hatted scholar athletes of the Big Ten, all lovingly protected from dismissal if lazy and unwilling to put forth maximum effort by the kindly Father Figure Coaches who all dwell up North, is the fact that our conference does in fact sign more questionable academic qualifiers than the Big-10.

That is a fact that I read about a zillion times a month here - the mantra of the overall better academics of the Big-10 conference when compared to the SEC. And I would not/will not challenge that fact, as despite 86's snarky comment, this SEC alumnus is smart and well read enough to recognize the quality of academics that are inherent in the Big-10 when compared to the institutions in the SEC. See, generally, U.S. News rankings and the Association of American Universities members list. Duh. Or double duh, as it were...

So all of the bemoaning about the number of kids signed is meaningless unless you factor in the stats on how many underclassmen leave for the NFL at the respective conferences, and what is the respective attrition rate in the conferences due to injury; due to failure to qualify; failure to remain qualified once accepted; number of times a single individual has been listed more than once in more than one "class", and show that it made a substantive difference in the performance of a program.

The stats show that the number of oversigns has little relevance to the respective success of the SEC programs in-conference, i.e., there appears to be no correlation between teams in the SEC that "over-sign" more, at least so far as that equates to more success winning SEC divisions and SECCGs.

Because, no matter how you look at it, the numbers used by oversign.com to make their point are not statistically relevant unless one factors in all of the contributing factors that make up the respective total number of "oversigns". IOW, what we need is a pure stat that reflects solely the number of signed kids already playing in a program who were launched solely to let a better kid with a better chance of starting, performing.

Everything else is supposition bull[censored].

So what I would like to see is the numbers from the list of Big-10 recruits who signed but did not qualify, compared to the SEC recruits that signed but did not qualify. I would hazard a guess that there were more SEC non-qualifiers than there were B10 kids.

I would like to see the number of recruits who had to drop because they could not meet the academic requirements of their schools, by respective conferences.

I would like to see the number of kids who transferred to another institution for playing time, by respective conferences. And I get that this stat is one that will open a can of worms, as y'all will interpret a scenario where a kid is taken aside by a coach and told he will likely not see any playing time the next year or two in a manner that may be different than I do.

So, do we know that the kids in the Big-10 have "NFL player" as their career goal to the same respective percentage as SEC players??? How can we be sure than is the case? And if a kid is - to be honest - more concerned with a potential career in the NFL (which will only occur if he can get PT and film at, say, Alcorn State - and impress at least one scout enough for a training camp tryout) than in a degree in Physical Education, is an act of telling him a truthful read of his future at the program that makes him leave for PT that "evil"?

Yeah, lying to a kid is wrong, but I doubt it would be a lie, as only a fool would launch a possible starter who has mastered the academic and social life of college for a "maybe better star" h.s. kid who has an upside. That would be stupid.

The thing is, it just [censored]es me off to see some of the posters here take everything as Gospel from "meat market" when I know some of it is pure fabrication. It [censored]es me off when Nutria shows you why the kid bitching about being let out of his scholarship was let go - he decided to spend more time competition eating than throwing the ball - and for that to be completely ignored in favor of the whining of the kid who ate himself into the anti-athlete. And if the manner in which he was told was not the manner that was optimal - Hell, even if it was rude - the topic is how y'all maintain that unethical oversigning is the reason for SEC success.

So I guess I am unimpressed by the methodology used so far to support that claim. I would win a Daubert motion IMO....

But I will go so far as to say that the superior academics of the Big-10, in so afar as expectation of a pro career and in the ability to qualify and remain qualified, appear to leave you at some disadvantage.....but only if the stats fall out one way. Again, this thread is big on supposition.

Finally, if routinely the SEC launches kids from programs - specifically via non-renewal of scholarships (of athletes who would not otherwise be quitting the program due to injury, playing time, or inability to meet team or academic qualifications) - solely to let in better athletes - then I would agree that it is a problem if it affected kids in numbers greater than the effect it had on kids in the Big-10 who were non-renewed in a similar manner.

Mostly I am just cranky about things in general, and specifically the pile-on-all-things-SEC that is more prevalent. Does that mean you are playing anyone I know in the near future???