They absolutely deserve a harsher punishment given their lengthy rap sheet over the last decade. Just take away the postseason games for the next three years and this time make the probabtion stick. If they commit infractions while on probation, the punishment is supposed to be more harsh. Went they on probation in ’05 when all this started? I like the video game approach: “you can only offer scholarships to 15 players this season.”

You, Sir, are an idiot. This punishment does absolutely nothing to the UA program.

Joel, this is false. That was the total value of extra textbooks they received, and all textbooks were returned.

And VolBrian, you’ve been listening to too many Auburn fans. The Gadsden rumors have been looked into and nothing was found, at least as far as Alabama is concerned.

I’m one who sees cash as a medium of exchange, so it would never bother me to say they received x dollars in benefits when those benefits came in a non-monetary form. In the interest of accuracy, it’d be great to have an understanding on one point: did they use these textbooks in courses in lieu of buying the textbooks? If so, did they have to pay the price for the textbooks when they were returned (or more appropriately, the difference between the purchase price and the resell value)? Whether they actually saw cash in their pockets over this is not the ultimate dividing line between receiving a benefit of monetary value.

Unless our Bama Brothern would like to twist reality (that Alabama cheats, and cheats, and cheats…) again.

Pete at RBR explains it all

The advertisement at the top of my page is “Sell us your old textbook.”

I’m done.

For real this time.

:)

It’s a loaded word, but does it really apply? What did the university do? They didn’t intentionally cheat, and they didn’t turn a blind eye to any cheating. Some athletes exploited the system to get their girlfriends textbooks which were later turned in. I don’t think that the label cheating should be applied to the university for this. It’s disingenuous.

Look at some of your secondary violations… simulating game day experiences with fog machines, etc. That was intentional and against the rules. So I guess UT is a bunch of cheaters too.

Carry on though. I suppose it will be all you can hang your hat on as we continue to whoop your asses for the foreseeable future.

Yeah, I may actually have to accomplish something today. :)

The one thing I will point out is that the justification for his argument was the one secondary violation that wasn’t actually a violation considering the fact Tennessee has never used smoke machines for any game day.

But, I will go no farther.

Because it’s so far up, I’ll quote you here, TFIT, rather than use the reply so it’s easier to track.

Ultimately, no extra benefit was received. Books that were supposed to be covered by scholarship were covered by scholarship. Books that were recommended reading (not covered) were provided up front at no cost, but on discovery were paid for at the price that would have been paid at the time of pickup and in some cases, a penalty was added to that cost.

Under those conditions, I would agree that ‘ultimately’ there was no benefit. The problem appears to be that it required discovery before the books were paid for. That is, if this had not been discovered at this time, those books still would not have been paid for. Under that condition, there would be a benefit right now. And more to the facts of the timeline, the benefit existed all the way up to disovery (and most accurately, the requirement of restitution).

If I have that straight, then I have no problem saying they received benefits. If the problem was a loophole in university bookstore policy, then I have no problem saying that the university aided them in the improper receiving of benefits. I feel no need to lord it over anybody, partly because it’s so easy for loopholes like that to exist and partly because there’s no physical law of the universe that prevents this from happening elsewhere.

I’ll be happy to meet this on a middle ground, where we can safely admit that there was fault on behalf of some athletes and responsibility on behalf of the university, but that this was not some grand conspiracy to buy up the athletic proletariat of the South. I’ll even offer this: at the beginning of the fall in ’08, I was looking into policies across the SEC regarding academic eligibility of athletes. The project ended up going nowhere because about half of the SEC schools returned my very polite and honest inquiries with static. The school that was most eager to help explain their policies was the University of Alabama. Even knowing I was a UT blogger, they were most helpful.