Cam Warde Tampering: Biggest Scandal in Pac2 History

With The Game over and the result Another Resounding Victory, let's take a moment to reflect on the reality of college football rules and the hand-wringing over "competitive advantage."

 

I was scrolling TwiXter this morning and noticed the "Cameron Ward Receiving Multiple Million Dollar Offers" story. A few people commented that he hadn't entered the portal yet and so any school comms seeking to recruit him away from his current school would be considered tampering. This is, of course, against The Rules (TM). The account I had originally seen posting this story did a follow-up tweet acknowledging that this is "essentially normalized tampering" in a kind of matter of fact tone while the main focus of the story in every outlet that published it is just excitement over who will land a great QB.

Taking this a bit further, if you simply search "Tampering College Football", you'll be bombarded with a million articles about how rampant this practice is. Quotes from despondent G5 coaches lamenting the loss of their burgeoning star players every year are littered throughout:

Last August, NCAA officials sent a letter to members seeking help as they investigate cases of NIL inducement and tampering. Their enforcement staff needs these reluctant coaches and players to start providing “documentary evidence and details on the record” in order to expedite investigations. Coaches and athletic directors who’ve confronted other schools about tampering incidents have told The Athletic they’re reluctant to move forward with an NCAA inquiry or even go public with allegations because they don’t want to harm the player and they know pursuing it would be perceived as “sour grapes” or, worse, vindictive.

“Nobody’s really turning anybody in because nobody believes anything is gonna be done,” one coordinator at a Group of 5 school argued. “Who is the NCAA gonna bang on this? They ain’t gonna bang a blue-blood program on this, I promise you that. And, until something really substantial is done, it’s just gonna keep happening.
 

This is basically it in a nutshell. Many on this board have spent the last month carefully parsing NCAA bylaws to see if third party scouting is technically breaking the poorly-written bylaw that shouldn't technically have been available to Pettitty for use to leverage a B1G penalty against the program. Of course, Richard had his lawyers write up some marginally coherent slop and the cackling man hens who make up whichever goofy bureaucratic committee that "votes" on this type of decision rubber stamped it anyway. Michigan took its lumps instead of creating a larger media frenzy and then went out and handled its business anyway.

The reality of this story is very simple and it annoys me that people still don't seem to understand it on this board of all homer places. No, you do not, as a matter of fact, "gotta admit they kind of got us here and we should take our lumps" nor do you have to hate Connor Stalions for stepping into the utter wild wild west that is college football and doing what was presumably a very good job. The simple fact of the matter is that every single program has dozens of guys all working in various ways to skirt/break rules to gain competitive advantage. Any single one of those guys, if targeted by a hundred thousand dollars worth of investigating by a PI firm who then flushed the findings through a PR firm who worked with a cynical media apparatus hungry to create drama and clicks, could get launched into a story that would look exactly like the CS story. People who don't know anything about the need and drive within these programs to push every conceivable limit to gain any edge (big or small) will read any of those stories and be taken aback. "Golly gee, I'm shocked to find out there is gambling going on in this establishment." 

To circle it back to the beginning, the internet lawyers may dig around in the language and find that ackshually, if the school goes through a 3rd party interlocutor to make the NIL offer, it might not technically be against the rules hmmm. Sure, and maybe hiring your friends to record signals with an iphone could be parsed similarly. The point, of course, is to ask if landing a game ready, proven quarterback via possibly illegal means is worth more in terms of competitive advantage to a program than having some marginally improved understanding of Ohio State's signs from when they played Northwestern. No offense to Steven Threet, but I'm taking the quarterback. And yet, when exactly this is happening every year all over the country, there is no media firestorm. There are a few arms folded, brows furled articles about the "secret world of such and such in college football" but it doesn't get a dedicated wikipedia page for a single occurrence. It is largely ignored, a piece of trivia that die hard fans and various insiders talk about in euphemistic terms.

To wrap up this self-serving "should have been a diary" or "this is a message board, not group therapy" rant, think about why you're being told a story. Think about how much you actually know about the topic. Does the tone and outrage level match the alleged infraction? Is paying a guy to stare at grainy sideline footage of PSU that is 90% available from all-22 footage THE GREATEST SCANDAL IN B1G HISTORY? When you read the articles about Cam Warde and you realize the CS story could have been a few puff pieces in The Athletic which sounded something like "Inside the Naval War College Roots of Michigan's Scouting Machine" try to begin directing your ire at the proper targets. CS was the target of a sleazy media campaign that required a very abnormally malicious investigation, a willfully ignorant and mendacious media apparatus, and an ignorant and easily-outraged audience. Don't be a part of that last group.