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J Nesbitt and N Kern, we want you at your hometown team helping to continue the upward path Coach Ford along with Corey Tate and Ford Stuen have SLU on! You could be one of the very best duo's to ever come to SLU ranking right at the top with two guys leaving to make room for you--- J Goodwin and H French.

New St. Louis CITY SC Sporting Director Lutz Pfannenstiel taking in a Billiken Training session last night on an invite from Kevin Kalish.

Tatum with 31, 10 and 6 tonight in a Celtics win. Just another night at the office for the honorary Billiken.

I would love to see both of them become Billikens and make Team Blue history. Not many people get the chance in life to become home town heros. They will be loved and appreciated in this city long after they graduate. If Nesbitt goes to Illinois or Memphis he will just be another player and forgotten a year after he graduates.

Of course the athletic department is going to discuss their payoffs with the medical school administration. All payoffs have to have their stamp of approval.

Realistically, it was always going to come down to the wire with this commitment in my opinion. Nesbitt knows our staff well and he knows our players well. If he feels somewhere else is a better fit, then more power to him. But SLU handled his recruitment well and we won't have to spend any time second guessing whether we recruited him hard enough. These are 16/17 year old kids trying to make decisions with a million people in their ear telling them what to do. Sometimes they make good ones, sometimes they make bad ones. Sometimes decisions are rational, and sometimes kids change their mind. All SLU can do is continue to put ourselves in the best position for recruits like Nesbitt who are interested.

Haha I’m not speaking as if he wouldn’t at all. Just figured it was easier to make the point that way rather than saying “our 10-13 scholarship guys plus our preferred walk on”. It’s definitely pretty clear to everyone that Phil would undoubtedly be a scholarship player (And probably a top 8 guy) on almost any other Billiken team in history.

I'm actually a SLU alum, got my Masters there. Wife is an alum as well for both undergrad and masters. I follow a lot of Midwestern basketball recruiting. You are asking for "proof" of the recruitments of Gordon and Goodwin being dirty, but I think if Nesbitt goes to Illinois or Memphis you will be quite comfortable saying it was dirty without any such proof.

Anyone who is halfway clued in at SLU knew about the Gordon recruitment. My father in law works in admin at the med school and even he knew. He called me after he committed and said "You hear about this kid they got for the basketball team? Had to pay for a nice condo for his mom" The Gordon family was not particularly low key about what happened either.

I would expect you to look at it realistically. Look at Travis Ford's history of recruiting. He's always been a good recruiter. No doubting that. You don't get to be a consistently good recruiter in today's age without playing in the grey. That's just the nature of college basketball.

I will make one last post and then leave you all to live in the fantasy land where everyone cheats except SLU. Where do you think the money for inducements comes from? Do you think the athletic department is cutting them a check? You think the Coach is going to go to the AD and say "Hey boss sure would love to cheat so go ahead and cut a check to this kids family" The money comes from boosters. Boosters outside of the athletic department. Doctors happen to make a lot of money, and there are some of them that also happen to like SLU basketball a lot. They aren't acting in an official capacity as med school faculty. The whole point of the money coming from boosters outside of the athletic department is that it is harder to trace. This is how basically every school does it. There are other boosters who are not doctors, and I don't have much insight into what they are involved in. People like Reinert's daddy don't know about these things for three reasons. One, they don't go through the official channels and instead go through boosters. Two, you don't tell your boss when you are cheating or doing something potentially illegal. A coach isn't going to tell on themselves to the AD, and the AD isn't going to tell on their department to upper admin. Three, upper admin and typically the AD doesn't WANT to know about these things because if they did know they would be implicated if the whole thing blows up. As for Gordon, it wasn't an actual condo. That phrase was hyperbole. It was used to indicate the amount of money his family was paid, as opposed to say "had to buy his dad a car" which would indicate a lower level payout. For those wondering, my bachelors was actually from Bradley (SOOOOOOO SLIMY).

Not even close to true.

You do realize that we have also gotten players that way. Carte'Are Gordon was a very dirty recruitment. Jordan Goodwin's dad got a nice payday. Ford is a good recruiter, but he's not clean.

Prove they were clean. Apply the same standard to yourself. You can't either. Some of the "red flags" you mentioned were that his family wanted to get paid, others were his attitude. I'm not claiming SLU cheats more than anyone else, or is more egregious. If you want to believe you are the only clean team in major D1 basketball go ahead. Sounds an awful lot like UK fans who say Cal is clean because he never got caught at UK.