Jeremiah Masoli Cleared To Play

I think you'd be surprised how many coaches thought this rule was a bad idea the day it was implemented.

 

You mean a sport's governing body accidentally left open a loophole that is now being abused by the teams and athletes themselves. Gary Bettman says only an organization run by idiots would leave open a loop hole like that.

 

I hope they do it. I hope every school does it. And, quite frankly, I'm glad such a high-profile player did it. Anything to show how stupid the people running the NCAA are and have been for the better part of 60 years is fine with me. Those buffoons don't care about loopholes and they sure as hell don't care about education. So if players and coaches want to exploit the system, I'm down.

 

Funny thing is that the rule was passed as a "student-welfare" issue. The rationale was it gave kids a chance to continue to play while pursuing a post-grad degree.

The easiest way to "fix" this would be to add a line in the rule that states a kid has to be in good standing not only academically - which Masoli was - but athletically as well - which Masoli wasn't.

And as I mentioned before, had it been up to the coaches as a group this rule wouldn't be on the books.

 

Couldn't they also require the pg work to be at same school that player was undergrad.

 

Georgia State got a transfer (might of been two) from Georgia Tech for something along these lines. But GSU is an FCS program, so the transfer rules wouldn't have been in play to begin with.

 

The rule was implemented to allow players to move to a school that offered a grad program their current school did not offer.

Players were already allowed to compete as grad students at their current schools.

 

What's Masoli's undergraduate degree in?

 

Sociology.

I will say this for Masoli: according to the valentine SI.com ran in his defense a couple of months ago, the guy is solid academically. He (allegedly) had Harvard and Yale interested in him in high school, prior to the first guilty plea for something he didn't do.

 

Think about this, guy got his degree. He actually finished his degree in 4 years. How many guys in D-1 BCS schools actually did that the past say 10 years? I'd say less than 10%. Call him a flunkie, whatever, he still completed his degree. As for that "valentine", who's to say whether his story is true or not. Whether it was true or not, I think what was unfortunate is he got some very bad legal advice.

 

This may be an unanswerable question, but it'd be interesting to know what percentage of master's candidates in the Ole Miss P&R program got their undergraduate degree in sociology. I guess it's one of those degrees that translates to just about anything, but that track seems strange to me. Still looks like he manipulated the system to me.

 

Again, how did he "manipulate the system"?

The rule doesn't require that the grad program has to be in the same field as a kid's undergrad program. What he did was completely within the rules.

The only group that attempted to manipulate the system in this case was the NCAA, which initially denied him the right to play even though he followed the rules.

If you don't like the rule don't blame Masoli. Blame the university presidents that approved it.