Waaay back in March, right before Jim Tressel’s inability to use Microsoft Outlook’s “forward” feature became national news, we told you that there were some allegations regarding a “recruiting specialist” named Will Lyles. There were several programs that were alleged to be recipients of his particular “services”, but the most notable was the University of Oregon.
Today, following a number of the types of Public Records Requests that we Buckeye fans have, unfortunately, gotten pretty used to, the University of Oregon released a number of emails and documents to the media regarding this matter. Oh, to be a private school like Duke, Northwestern, or Southern Cal…
There’s a ton of them to go through, but here are a couple of the things that I found particularly interesting:
- First, as our friend ParagonSC point out- this is a bucketload of phone calls to Texas from Eugene. I guess Lyles’ role of “consultant” was similar to the good folks at Butterball around Thanksgiving– always available, and frequently used (at least at my house… mmmmm turkey).
- This is a really extensive 2011 national scouting report, with two teensy problems: A) It’s not national (mostly Texas, which makes sense), and B) Most of the students listed were a part of the 2009 recruiting class. For instance, on page 44 is a sleeper QB out of Houston named Kenny Guiton. Yup, that one… as a part of the class of 2011 recruiting package.
- One of the players highlighted went to North Texas and passed away. Yeah.
- As a reminder, this is all happening in an atmosphere where finances are already under scrutiny- we talked about this before, but U of O is already asking questions about how much their “self sufficient” athletic department is costing the taxpayers, and if all of Phil Knight’s money is really benefiting the entirety of the student body.
For full clarity- There is a little bit of satisfaction/relief that this story is not about Ohio State… it’s been a hard couple of months. However, as college sports fans, it’s important to not get our schadenfreude out of the bag just yet- this is a national issue, and one of the motivators (I’m sure) for the upcoming NCAA summit on the future of Division 1. Plus, we Buckeye fans don’t currently have much solid ground to stand on when we throw stones, and shouldn’t poke the karma gods.
We’ll continue to follow this story as it develops- I’m sure that Yahoo and George Dohrmann are headed to Eugene even as we speak to help keep us abreast of the full details in this matter.
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