THE DAILY FEED 3.21.11 // More News on Lorenzo Mauldin and Oversigning

Other than a few extremely vocal exceptions, they’re all pretty nice folks who are able to take a measured view of the issue. I do think, though, that that AJC article was aimed at the kind of Georgia fan you’re talking about.

Also, I think you hit the nail on the head by pointing out that oversigning isn’t against the rules. If I hear oversigning referred to as “cheating” again, I think I’m going to puke. Oversigning is not “cheating,” and while that doesn’t make it right, it does make you wonder about the perspective of Texas_Dawg’s brilliant argument that oversigning is going to be CFB’s version of the MLB steroid’s scandal.

Which is part of the reason that I’m in favor of ending the practice. However, I do think it’s a little more complicated than you’re suggesting. While you’re right that the fact that oversigning requires attrition oftentimes means that oversigned athletes later become victims of roster gutting, which ends up meaning that the supposed opportunity they got to attend a school like South Carolina is negated, it’s also true that they at least get the chance to go to South Carolina under current regulations. If oversigning is more strictly regulated, that won’t happen because, depending on how the new regulations work, coaches won’t take chances on them. The academically at-risk players will end up at the lesser institutions from the beginning. Now, they at least get the chance to go to a USC or an Arkansas first, and then they go to Alabama St., etc., if it doesn’t work out.

I don’t really buy competitive advantage as a major talking point. If the welfare of student athletes isn’t what’s at stake here, then oversigning is just like any other legal means of gaining an advantage over one’s opponents—in other words, not a problem other than for those who aren’t doing it effectively, as everyone—at least within particular conferences—has the opportunity to play by the same rules. I guess you could make the argument that the NCAA needs to establish ground rules between the conferences in order to make national competition more equitable. In that sense, I can see the competitive advantage argument much better from the perspective of the Big 10 than I can from Georgia fans. The problem to me is that oversigning is exploitative; I don’t believe that the gray area you see here and there outweighs the clearly negative impact it’s had on many student athletes, Mauldin included. Moreover, I don’t think you’re going to get much sympathy from oversigning programs by playing the competitive advantage card, so there’s a rhetorical exigency here, too. If you want an audience for this, you have to play to something that a large group of people can agree on. Lots of people are going to see competitive advantage as selfish, while a much larger number will see some reason in the welfare side of the issue. If you want to mobilize that audience, you have to play to its perspective to some degree.

Welcome to Garnet and Black Attack. We’re glad to have you and we welcome dissenting opinions as long as they’re presented like yours was.

I’d like to see an end to all the grandstanding and for the problem simply to be solved.