Bo Ryan being attacked by bloggers, opposing fans, and sports writers with an agenda? It must be the offseason, so let the hits start coming I guess. Normally, it's whatever to us here – I mean, it's become a running joke by now and frankly it's nothing we haven't all heard a thousand times before.
Normally, that's the case, but every once in a while there's a new angle of attack and well, after thinking we've heard them all before here at MTB we've found a new one. Apparently now Bo Ryan is an evil person attracting and recruiting walk-on's to pad the team GPA and well, we'll let one Joseph Nardone (the article's author) say it best:
Now, somehow, schools (Not just Wisconsin) are recruiting their walk-ons. These players are generally borderline D-I talent, but add either great depth to the practice team or, more diabolically, are decent enough players but whose grades are so swell, it alters a program’s team grade average — keeping them safe from any potential NCAA sanctions.
Yep, that's a new one if we've ever heard it. If you bother to read the full "article" and we use that term loosely, Nardone attempts to make some sort of point that the NCAA is doing a disservice to players and allowing coaches – notice how Bo Ryan is his only example – to artificially inflate their team GPA's.
Nothing like lazy and uninformed blogging from Rant Sports to make your day better, huh?
What about an individual actually making a choice that he/she thinks is best for them. Perhaps getting a chance to be involved in a program they've been following since they were 5 all while also earning a top quality degree is exactly what they want. Who are we and who the hell would the NCAA be to tell a person they can't do that?
That's about as Un-American as it comes…
Never mind the fact that the Badgers had the same amount of scholarship players make the Academic All-Big Ten list as walk-on's, or the fact that star Ryan Evans (who last time I checked was on scholarship) will graduate with a 4.0 cumulative GPA in May, or the fact that Zak Showalter went from "recruited walk-on" to scholarship player because he earned it and another scholarship player, that we'll referee to as "that guy" from here on out, transferred out of the program himself.
Hey, go ahead and have an opinion, this is America and no one should stifle your right to an opinion, but is it too much in the world of sports to expect it to be at least a minimally researched or factually accurate opinion?
If the "article's" author wanted to point to programs like Kentucky or some of the others that have issues with one-and-done's in the program on an annual basis, fine – perhaps you'd have a point and even then isn't the point really that the APR is the issue and not how teams are "allowed to recruit walk-on's?"
That's neither here nor there though, instead this piece of junk writing just comes off as some weird personal hit piece against Bo Ryan, using him as the bogeyman to prove a point that doesn't hold water when you actually know what the facts are. Nice try, but next time come with something that actually makes sense and until then take your personal grudge against Bo Ryan and the Badgers somewhere else.
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