MadtownTiger

What are the rules about recruiting a prospect mentioned in an improper benefits investigation? If the NCAA starts an actual inquiry at TAM, and part of it involves Harris, would the Aggies be allowed to maintain communication and eventually sign him? WDE!

I know that part is 100% true. There was a huge donation to build/upgrade a county-operated athletic facility Dematha shares with other schools. DeMatha isn't hurting for loose cash, and this was something they couldn't afford. There's also a huge indoor track/field, an aquatic center, an academic resource building, a gymnastics center and a really nice fitness center. It wasn't all uat booster money, though. People have speculated there was a concerted effort from a few of those schools to shop players. Prince George's County is so corrupt, nothing would surprise me. About the same time the FBI raided the county commissioner's house and arrested him and his wife for being the masterminds behind a multi-million dollar pay-for-play scheme. They caught him trying to flush a $100K check down the toilet. She had like $50K in cash stuffed in her bra. WDE! Edit: I just looked it up. She got caught with $79,600 cash in her bra.

I spent about six years in College Park and Riverdale Park, Maryland, which is literally a parking lot away from DeMatha, where CK went to school. Most of my work involved teaming with municipal and county agencies on design projects. Since this is pretty much all hearsay, I can't claim it's absolutely the real story, but this is what I heard from people that know pieces of how that went down. On one particular project, a volunteer, who happened to be a teacher at DeMatha (he claimed to be CK's favorite teacher), noticed my AU hat and we had a few conversations about the football culture at Maryland versus the SEC. While discussing CK, he talked about what kind of kid he was, and that he was confident Auburn would get his signature. I figured he was simply telling me what I wanted to hear, so I kind of didn't believe him. Point being, according to this guy, CK had already made up his mind about Auburn and knew better than to make it public. A few months later on another project, I worked with a guy from the county planning commission who happened to be a huge LSU fan. By that point all sorts of stories were circulating about how uat flipped him, one of the big ones being that a uat booster donated a ton of money for a new stadium in order to get CK. He told me the anonymous donor was Chris Samuels. He hated dink and uat, and said he wanted to turn them in to the NCAA but never did anything because he didn't want to risk losing the facility. CK wasn't going to school around there (or LSU), so why bother. Fast forward again, the same county guy told me he then believed uat had committed a major violation, possibly even fraud, because the deal to donate the money for the facility was definitely between uat boosters and the folks in DeMatha's athletic department, not MNCPPC. He also said the head football coach at DeMatha, who had been there for decades, raised hades when he found out they were shopping players. He resigned and took an unpaid position at a rival school when uat threatened to cut CK's brother and DeMatha sided with the turds. WDE!

I'll take that as a recommendation. WDE!

Same here, but with Civ V. I've never played Skyrim. Looks cool, I just haven't gotten around to it. WDE!

I read somewhere it might end up on Steam, which would be effing awesome. It wouldn't matter what was in the game, as long as it's bug free. Steam allows users to create/upload edits (mods) to change the actual game, the characters, the gameplay, everything. I've played around with making my own maps for Civilization V (it's kind of like Risk, but you have to manage all aspects of your country, not just the military), but I have hundreds of mods other folks created. If they had a football game and you want to play with interplanetary conferences, Star Wars versus Star Trek characters or something, create the mod (or wait until someone else does). Uniform or stadium changes? Gruesome injuries? Course hazards? 128-team playoff? Zombie apocalypse? Whatever you want. Discovering Steam was a total paradigm shift for me. WDE!

What don't you like about the recruiting part? WDE!

Elijah would disagree. WDE!

They say there's a little bit of God in all of us, even if we don't recognize Him. Well, I hope He likes chimichangas, because that's what He's getting. WDE!

Leviticus 20 is difficult to reconcile. I don't know anyone that has ever gone through with such activity, thankfully, but I know a ton of people who consider themselves love-thy-neighbor Christians that will drop verse 13 without batting an eye. WDE!

Yes and no. The Supreme Court has interpreted Jefferson's words as "gospel" (pun intended) in some rulings, and ignored them absolutely in others. So SCOTUS is really no help at all on this topic. The phrase seemingly relates to the Legislative branch, because it dovetails with the first amendment, but I sincerely don't think that's what Jefferson meant. I believe his comments were directed at the Executive branch. The phrase is not in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, so the proverbial wall is more of an assumption than a right. And you know what they say about assumptions and rights, everybody's got them and they all stink. Maybe that's supposed to be opinions and.....digressions. The phrase "separation of church and state" came from an open letter Jefferson wrote to a group of Quakers in New York or Pennsylvania (I think, might have been Baptists) regarding the Establishment/Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment. Unlike the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution wasn't the most popular document, and the vote to ratify was razor thin in about a third of the colonies/states. When Jefferson was elected the Constitution was only about ten years old, and state charters adopted before the Revolution were often regarded as the prevailing authorities. The group had written to the new president to weigh in on the issue of state charters that didn't specifically adopt the language of the First Amendment. But here's the thing, it's counter-intuitive to our thinking now, but they were petitioning for a greater separation. As protestants they believed that while a legislator (a king or a pope or a president) had the right to be religious, they lacked the authority to dictate any religious edicts one way or the other. Further, they argued the prime role of government is simply to to administer justice among citizens. In his letter Jefferson agreed with everything they proposed---including the government's recognition of a sovereign God---and reaffirmed his support by introducing an allusion to something written 150 years earlier about a cultivated religion being the wall between civility and the chaotic world. Simply put, the context of Jefferson's words to the Quakers(?) was not about keeping religion out of government as much as keeping government out of religion. WDE!

I agree with you that it's interesting. I also agree with CCT it's in the wrong forum. WDE!

Well, I would counter that the problem with nutshells is they're almost always an oversimplification. Judaism, Christianity and Islam (arguably even Buddhists) all worship the same God, they just have different prophets. The Koran acknowledges Jesus was a prophet of God, but Mohammed was a more recent prophet. Mormons and Satanists believe in that same God, they just have different takes on how to proceed. Until we look at Asiatic, pagan, or aboriginal/archaic religions, they pretty much all worship the same deity, and an argument can be made even they have the Big Guy at the very top of their hierarchy. WDE!

Does Rule #5 apply here, or is it superseded by #8? Also wondering if #4 applies to the personal lives of players, of it's strictly gameday performance. WDE!

I know we were/are hoping for the best, but to be frank, I'm not sure we should have expected much more. With our OG commits already signed and no OT prospects committed, we replaced the position coach three weeks before NSD. The fact that we brought in a guy with a reputation for being an average recruiter only made the situation more difficult. Just our bad luck it happened at a position of need. This is by no means an argument for fighting tooth and nail to keep Hand, just an observation about how such moves don't happen in a vacuum. As I understand it, when Hand left it cost us a ton of momentum with OTs Gouraige and Barnes. I believe it was H.P. Lovecraft that said, "From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent." Might have been Alanis Morissette, I get them mixed up sometimes. WDE!