Truly bizarre situation with Palmetto State native John Chavis, who's suing both his former and present employer over the $400,000 that he supposedly owes his former employer.
This one is for lawyers to sort out, but Scott Rabalais of the Baton Rouge paper finds evidence that might not exactly help The Chief's case.
The photograph from Kris Boyd's Twitter feed is dated Jan. 15.
It shows the Gilmer, Texas, football prospect standing in a room at Gilmer High School, arm in arm with former LSU defensive coordinator John Chavis, along with three other people.
Chavis is wearing a Texas A&M pullover. Everyone is smiling their hashmarks off.
Such a happy picture, though I think pretty soon it's going to be the folks at LSU who will be doing the smiling/doubling over in laughter.
Boyd eventually signed with Texas, but that's not the point here.
The point is Chavis was apparently off campus recruiting for Texas A&M during the time he claims he wasn't actually employed by A&M.
The claim is the crux of Chavis lawsuit against LSU (and Texas A&M, amusingly) that argues he does not owe LSU the $400,000 buyout for breaking his contract. He said he didn't actually start working for Texas A&M until Feb. 13, his official hire date in College Station, after giving LSU a 30-day notice that expired Feb. 4.
And this:
A Division I football program can have a total of 10 coaches conduct off-campus recruiting. If Chavis was out recruiting for A&M in January, he was by definition one of its designated recruiters. That means he was representing A&M's interests whether he was an according to Hoyle employee or not. And if he was representing A&M, then he would seem to be violation of his contract with LSU, meaning he (or A&M, which has agreed to pay his buyout if necessary) owes LSU $400,000.
If he wasn't one of A&M's designated recruiters, then he's a booster. A booster in a maroon Texas A&M shirt. And that's an NCAA violation.
A few Monday links:
-- Way back in 1948, a kid named Vince Dooley attended his first football game in his hometown of Mobile, Ala. The teams? Auburn and Clemson. That and more in this cool story on what Dooley is doing now.
The former coach keeps busy with gardening ("which is my golf") and history. "Gardening is good for the mind, good for the body, good for the soul," he says. Dooley also serves as the Vice-Chair of the Georgia Historical Trust and is on the board of the Georgia Civil War Trust-an organization whose mission is to preserve battlefield land (ironically, Dooley consults a football program near a major Civil War battle-The Battle of Kennesaw Mountain). He's a reader, swallowing up all three volumes of the Atkinson trilogy on the liberation of Europe during WWII, and has written an article that was recently published in Georgia Historical Quarterly on the 1942 Georgia Pre-Flight team that boasted a young assistant coach named Paul Bryant.
-- Love these types of behind-the-scenes stories: How Michigan's Jim Hackett landed Jim Harbaugh.
"It was after I handled the Brady situation," Hackett said. "The important thing there was the Harbaugh family. Jim and John's father, Jack, was a coach at Michigan when I was there and I knew Jack. I actually called Jack first and hadn't seen him in years but reminded him who I was, …He was such a wonderfully positive guy. I would talk to him every day. I called him and told him what I was working on and said, before I get in the middle of all of this, whether you think there is any interest from Jim. I said I'm looking at a lot of people, but I don't want to waste a lot of his time and my time. So Jack got back to me and said 'I think it's probably worth you talking to him.' "
That first move set the groundwork for how Hackett would proceed.
According to Hackett's version of the events, everything was a soft sell, a focus on relationships and not the job when talking to Jim Harbaugh. That became the perfect process because Harbaugh didn't want to talk about taking the U-M job when he was still coaching the San Francisco 49ers.
"That started a series of phone calls (with Jim) that never really talked about -- funny thing now that I thought about it -- 'Do you want to come as a coach at Michigan?' " Hackett said. "We started talking more about those barbell diagrams and what it took to win today and what had happened to the Michigan program in the last seven years. The one thing about coaches, they're not going to criticize each other."
-- The Syracuse Post-Standard provides an Orange-tinted editorial on the whole NCAA mess.
NCAA standards are so exhaustive, schools maintain whole staffs of people to monitor and enforce them. Some rules are picayune; others are simply inane. But rules are rules, and SU admitted it violated at least some of them. Not all violations are equally severe, however.
We question whether the punishment in this case fits the crime. (After all, no state or federal laws were broken.) With the high standards Syverud has set for academics, the NCAA should have taken the self-imposed penalty as severe enough in dealing with academic infractions, which are the university's responsibility.
Can you say fanboy newspaper?
-- Jon Solomon of CBS Sports opines on what the Syracuse case told us about academic fraud.
Including:
1. Syracuse employees cut out the middleman to cheat
Forget athletes turning in fraudulent work on their own. Syracuse did it for them. Former Syracuse director of basketball operations Stan Kissel literally collected and maintained players' usernames and passwords to email accounts and provided them to employees in athlete support services who help tutor players.
Kissel had been hired by coach Jim Boeheim to correct Syracuse's academic problems. Kissel and support staffers sent emails from players' accounts and corresponded directly with their professors. "Numerous emails included attached academic coursework, which was necessary to maintain the required grades for student-athletes to remain eligible," the NCAA wrote.
Needless to say, the submitted work wasn't done by Syracuse players. As part of the investigation, Syracuse used metadata analysis and found potential issues related to creating, editing and transmitting the assignments. The analysis found that "the 'Author' and 'Last edited by author' field was attributed to someone other than the student-athlete," the NCAA wrote.
-- Speaking to a group of about 700 fans, Boeheim gets choked up talking about the "hell of a battle ahead of us" with the NCAA. He also says he's "not going anywhere."
-- Richard Dietsch of SI has a lengthy sit-down with Katie Noland, and also reports that the overnight rating for the Duke-UNC game was surpassed by ... boxing?
NBC's primetime debut of the Premier Boxing Champions series drew a 2.53 overnight rating, according to the network, beating ESPN's telecast of Duke-North Carolina college basketball. As for the number of viewers, sports television ratings analyst Douglas Pucci said the preliminary number was 3.13 million total viewers. NBC said its overnight rating peaked at 3.01 from 10:30-11 p.m. ET for the final six rounds of the Keith Thurman-Roberto Guerrero bout. Not surprisingly, the network said the rating tripled NBC average for Saturday afternoon fights from 2012-14.
-- And Patrick Stevens provides a bracket update, plus a great photo of Cliff Ellis:
LW
This post was edited on 3/9 9:14 AM by Larry_Williams
