After last year's oversigning kerfuffle it's gotten to the point where people are emailing me the various malfeasances of coaches in search of hot young things with the expectation head will asplode to the entertainment of all. Doctor Saturday might end up a little disappointed with this post, then, as he forwards along this shockingly frank admission from new New Mexico State coach DeWayne Walker:
"My strategy is to oversign," Walker said.You... what you? What?
"And what that means is that if you have 18 scholarships, you sign 23 guys and out of that, those five extra scholarships are high school kids. So, if I sign 23, those five high school kids will have to sit out one semester."Oh. DeWayne, we need to talk about how you phrase these things: Walker's talking about grayshirting a bunch of guys, which is a semi-common practice when schools jut run out of slot but still want a recruit or three (or, in one spectacularly weird recruiting year for Oregon State, eleven). As long as the players in question commit and sign with the full knowledge they're being delayed a semester, it's hard to get perturbed.
Where the asplode comes in is when large numbers of kids are removed from a team for dubious injuries, "encouraged" to transfer, or plain cut in a couple cases. That's breaking an implied covenant -- though athletic scholarships are technically year-to-year, no one commits to a school who says "we'll try you out for a couple years and if you work out, hey, cool" -- in a system that's pretty explotative of college athletes.
Walker doesn't appear to be doing this. In fact, if he was going to do it there'd be no need for the grayshirts. However, there are a couple of huge classes this year that are going to have an extremely unpleasant cram-down phase. North Carolina is the main one, but I'll hold back on that situation until the class is in ink. Then you'll get your aerosol brain matter.
