Jeremiah Masoli Cleared To Play

If the NCAA is going to approve Masoli's transfer to Ole Miss knowing full well how and why he did it, it would be beyond hypocritical to then penalize Ole Miss if Masoli leaves Oxford before completing his graduate program. Since the NCAA generally tries to operate as hypocritically as possible, they probably do have some absurd extension of APR that penalizes a kid for leaving grad school to go play professional football.

Of course, my opinion is that APR in general is misguided and the fact that teams can lose scholarships based on the arbitrary guidelines used by APR is even worse.

 

Apparently one of the signs at ESPN College GameDay yesterday was "Masoli for Heistman." Sounds about right. ;D

 

Just watched end of that game- it was 4th and 15 . DB's really screwed up letting end get behind them.

 

Masoli gets to play after clearly abusing the system, less than a week after his appeal. But the NCAA has had six weeks to make a determination on who was at the agent's party in Miami, and we're getting crickets.

 

Uh, how did he "abuse" the system? The system absolutely allows what he did.

 

I assumed Boom was using the word "interesting" in the sense that, with Masoli, Ole Miss would shake things up in the SEC West. If he didn't mean it in that sense, then yes, it was a very interesting game.

 

I'll concede that point, which is absolutely true in a literal sense. Still, he has one year of eligibility left. He's not getting that master's degree in a year, and the guy has shown no propensity to stay in one place for three years. Two different high schools. One year at a juco, two at Oregon. Anybody with any sense whatsoever knows this is an artful dodge. Except, apparently, the subcommittee. The NCAA's original ruling, which included the statement "the waiver exists to provide relief to student-athletes who transfer for academic reasons to pursue graduate studies, not to avoid disciplinary measures at the previous university," made sense.

But my beef isn't about that so much as the other schools that are being left in limbo in a situation that has been going on long before Masoli/Mississippi filed their appeal.

 

I'll bet that within two years, every SEC school will begin to offer a master's degree in something that isn't offered at any other football-playing university. Rocks for jocks hits the grad school!

 

What Masoli is doing is absolutely within the spirit of the rule the NCAA put in place. He's not the first kid to take advantage of it and he won't be the last as long as the rule is in place.

To say he abused the system is patently ridiculous.

 

You realize this rule has been on the books for about 3-4 years now, right? If they were going to do something like that they already would have done it.

 

Or they just didn't realize the practical application vis a vis a knucklehead like Masoli. Up till now the only guys using it have been actual smart people with non-football career aspirations, going from football factories to places like Stanford and Rice; now that the Sabans of the world see that a dude like that can get a B.S. (double entendre noted) degree somewhere, they'll adapt. I'm sure Auburn's coaches did a collective forehead-slap when they realized they could have had Masoli if only they offered a master's degree in recess.

 

Then how about we say the system is profoundly fucked up?