...wait...what? Elliot Porter is redshirting this year because he was grayshirted last year? Alfy Hill was kicked off Alabama's team because, after initially accepting his high school grades, they changed their minds and decided they weren't good enough?
Now November 4, 2011 is eleventy bajillion years ago in Internet time, but that's when the Wall Street Journal called this game what it is, the "Super Bowl of Oversigning." And July 16, 2011 is even older, and that's when the Gainesville Times ran an in-depth piece about oversigning and how Florida and Georgia were upset by it. When your abuse of scholarship limits is so shady that Florida and Georgia are saying, "hey that's going too far," you know something's wrong.
And this isn't a single year problem. Brian Cook's been fighting the good fight for ages. Oversigning.com has talked about nothing else for years. Yet somehow, now that LSU and Alabama are reaping the rewards of their dishonesty and mistreatment of college kids, everyone's shutting up. We know why ESPN won't say anything - they're televising the damn game. We know why CBS won't say anything. They have a huge contract with the SEC and won't risk it by doing any actual journalism. But there's no reason for us not to say anything.
Elliot Porter's at LSU now, and he thinks he understands things. He's drunk the LSU Flavor-Aid* and he says, "college football is just a business." Time to bust out the small caps of Death: Sorry Elliot, it's not a business. You know how you can tell it's not a business? If it were a business, LSU would have sent you a nice paycheck every couple of weeks for the work you've done this year. Businesses pay their employees for services rendered.
So LSU and Alabama are going to pretend that this is a business, as long as they don't have to give the players any cash. Fine then, you shittiest shitheads that were ever shat from yo mama's shitholes. Play your stupid game for the right to be the 33rd best professional team in the country. Even the Colts would kick both of your oversigning, grayshirting, loophole-exploiting asses back into the Gulf of Mexico. We've already seen that the Dolphins can send Nick Saban crying to Tuscaloosa as fast as his bony coward ass can take him.
The BCS decides the mythical national champion. We all know this is a joke and Oklahoma State, and maybe Stanford and a few others, had as much right to play for the championship as Alabama did. If we're going to have an MNC this year, let's at least make it a good myth. Let's not have a myth where cheaters exploit loopholes and prosper, where slimy athletic departments lie to 17- and 18-year-olds and don't get punished, where winning hollow unscrupulous victories is more important than behaving honestly and fairly.
We can pick whatever myth we like, so let's pick a better one. Oklahoma State beat Stanford and they won the national championship at the Fiesta Bowl. It's not a great myth: crazy old billionaire buys his alma mater a national championship is not exactly an uplifting life lesson, but it's better than the alternative. And Mike Gundy is a better hero for our story than either Saban or Miles: he's famous for making an ass of himself by standing up for his players, not for finding loopholes to get rid of them.
The BCS is an evil joke perpetrated by Phil Knight's wheels of immature cheese. Our myth has a slightly better joke. Since Oklahoma State is our MNC, we've made the shirts they should have received after beating Stanford. Here's the design (click for larger version):
*Craig would be mad at me if I didn't get the details of the Jonestown Massacre correct.
**Congratulations to McMaster University of Hamilton, Ontario, the only university football national champion who won their title as a result of a rational system. If Nike had made them a shirt, it would have said "McMasters of the gridiron."
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