JT requests Release from NLI

[HoosierBilliken]

1 minute ago, DeSmetBilliken said:

I think this is a good point. As long as the NCAA allows it, I can't really fault Mizzou for doing it. I did hear that college football either has or will soon implement a rule that will regulate hiring parents as coaches in an attempt to get recruits. 

 

Might be a good idea.  Set some standard such as if a coach is hired who has a kid that plays he cannot be paid above the average of three of the highest paid assistant coaches on the team.  Just a random thought to keep the payoff to a minimum to avoid a bidding contest.

[bills10]

Or an anti-nepotism clause that says you can't play for an immediate family member would solve the problem quickly. 

[HenryB]

8 minutes ago, DeSmetBilliken said:

I think this is a good point. As long as the NCAA allows it, I can't really fault Mizzou for doing it. I did hear that college football either has or will soon implement a rule that will regulate hiring parents as coaches in an attempt to get recruits. 

 

If that is your standard then any kind  of sleazy action can be rationalized.  Again....no one on this board has ever argued that this was illegal.  This entire discussion began when Mizzou supporters began lecturing us on  what a high character, virtuous man Cuonzo Martin is.   Martin and  Mizzou had a choice....they chose the sleaze option.  Fine...their  choice....but spare the undeserved platitudes of what a great guy Martin is.

[JMM28]

I have no problem letting schools hire relatives or whatever to get their recruits. 

my problem is listening to the NCAA stand on some sort of holier than thou amateurism stance. It's a joke. The hit and miss nature of their enforcement only furthers my thoughts of hypocrisy. 

The NCAA and this thread of Mizzou fans are the same - just don't piss down my leg and tell me it's raining. Call it like it is. 

[DeSmetBilliken]

18 minutes ago, HoosierBilliken said:

Might be a good idea.  Set some standard such as if a coach is hired who has a kid that plays he cannot be paid above the average of three of the highest paid assistant coaches on the team.  Just a random thought to keep the payoff to a minimum to avoid a bidding contest.

I just did a little research into this new rule, and it appears it only applies to non-coaching, off-field positions. Rule apparently prohibits people close to recruits (parent, high school coach, trainer, etc) from being hired to these non coaching positions in the 2 years before and after a recruit's enrollment at a school. Also, I read that this rule may already apply in basketball. I guess if you want to use up a legit coaching position to bring in a recruit, go for it.

14 minutes ago, HenryB said:

If that is your standard then any kind  of sleazy action can be rationalized.  Again....no one on this board has ever argued that this was illegal.  This entire discussion began when Mizzou supporters began lecturing us on  what a high character, virtuous man Cuonzo Martin is.   Martin and  Mizzou had a choice....they chose the sleaze option.  Fine...their  choice....but spare the undeserved platitudes of what a great guy Martin is.

Fair point. I'll add that I spoke with some people that I would have expected to be thrilled about the recent developments at Mizzou, for several reasons. As it turns out, I got the idea that they found the whole thing pretty shady. It was an interesting perspective.

[HoosierBilliken]

6 minutes ago, JMM28 said:

I have no problem letting schools hire relatives or whatever to get their recruits. 

my problem is listening to the NCAA stand on some sort of holier than thou amateurism stance. It's a joke. The hit and miss nature of their enforcement only furthers my thoughts of hypocrisy. 

The NCAA and this thread of Mizzou fans are the same - just don't piss down my leg and tell me it's raining. Call it like it is. 

Mizzou fans, especially posters here, ooze either snobbery or hypocrisy or both constantly.     

[3star_recruit]

If the worse thing you can say about Cuonzo Martin is that he used a perfectly legal tactic to acquire a player, that doesn't disqualify him from being a high character guy.  I look at the totality of the man.  And if I was raising a young man from an underprivileged background, Cuonzo Martin is a pretty good role model.  Good family man, good in the community, takes mentoring of players seriously.

[MUTGR]

23 minutes ago, 3star_recruit said:

If the worse thing you can say about Cuonzo Martin is that he used a perfectly legal tactic to acquire a player, that doesn't disqualify him from being a high character guy.  I look at the totality of the man.  And if I was raising a young man from an underprivileged background, Cuonzo Martin is a pretty good role model.  Good family man, good in the community, takes mentoring of players seriously.

Do I as a Missouri fan think it's a bit sketchy hiring MPS and paying him $375k per year to be an assistant? Yes I do.  I think it's less sketchy than Larry Brown and hallowed KU hiring Danny Manning's father off a truck to coach, notwithstanding his background as a player.  It's within the rules and has been done many times over. My favorite poster here, Billiken Roy, pointed out Duke and Louisville creating jobs for parents.  Coach K is considered a saint in college basketball.  Folks, college basketball is sketchy.  You guys are excited because you hired a recruiter, a guy who gets players.  I think Ford is a good guy and good coach, but he's swam in the same waters Martin has. You can google an article about Bill Self planting himself outside the locker room at a tournament in Springfield Missouri and shouting congrats to John Wall during a dead period. Quin Snyder flew Paulding's and Johnson's parents to Columbia and said he did the same thing at Duke. 

I'll tell you this though, I saw a video of MPS and he's a very dynamic guy and has a great basketball background. He might be a better coach than any of us give him credit for. 

[Old guy]

Hey guys, if I may add my own two cents to this discussion, please. It is my firm belief that morality is something that cannot be regulated. Morality is something personal and everyone has to make their own decision when confronted with a case that involves such a choice. In this case it is the choice of paying money to a parent to obtain the services of a son. Fine, I am certain we can discuss this until the second coming with no firm or definitive answer that applies universally. I am also pretty sure that there are arguments in favor of and against doing this and that all of these arguments have some amount of truth in them. I know this is something has been done repeatedly by any number of coaches, this much is absolutely true. My point is that this is one of those situations where everyone should agree to disagree with other points of view simply because the arguments of the other person do not fit the choice you would have made personally. That is what a moral clash is all about, and agreeing to disagree is probably the best way to handle situations like these. 

[Coach314]

Just now, Old guy said:

Hey guys, if I may add my own two cents to this discussion, please. It is my firm belief that morality is something that cannot be regulated. Morality is something personal and everyone has to make their own decision when confronted with a case that involves such a choice. In this case it is the choice of paying money to a parent to obtain the services of a son. Fine, I am certain we can discuss this until the second coming with no firm or definitive answer that applies universally. I am also pretty sure that there are arguments in favor of and against doing this and that all of these arguments have some amount of truth in them. I know this is something has been done repeatedly by any number of coaches, this much is absolutely true. My point is that this is one of those things that everyone should agree to disagree with other points of view simply because the arguments of the other person do not fit the choice you would have made personally. That is what a moral clash is all about, and agreeing to disagree is probably the best way to handle situations like these. 

Well said!

[HoosierBilliken]

4 minutes ago, MUTGR said:

Do I as a Missouri fan think it's a bit sketchy hiring MPS and paying him $375k per year to be an assistant? Yes I do.  I think it's less sketchy than Larry Brown and hallowed KU hiring Danny Manning's father off a truck to coach, notwithstanding his background as a player.  It's within the rules and has been done many times over. My favorite poster here, Billiken Roy, pointed out Duke and Louisville creating jobs for parents.  Coach K is considered a saint in college basketball.  Folks, college basketball is sketchy.  You guys are excited because you hired a recruiter, a guy who gets players.  I think Ford is a good guy and good coach, but he's swam in the same waters Martin has. You can google an article about Bill Self planting himself outside the locker room at a tournament in Springfield Missouri and shouting congrats to John Wall during a dead period. Quin Snyder flew Paulding's and Johnson's parents to Columbia and said he did the same thing at Duke. 

I'll tell you this though, I saw a video of MPS and he's a very dynamic guy and has a great basketball background. 

Thank you for making a truthfully humble and honest evaluation of the game.  The only thing I would question are the highlighted areas, but I don't want to discourage you.

[brianstl]

One of my favorite parents getting a job stories is Hanborough's mom at UNC.  She got a fundraising job at UNC's dental school and got in trouble for spending UNC money to go see Tyler play on the road.  UNC later retroactively approved the trips as dental school fundraising activities.

Well after Tyler graduates she marries Matt Kupec.  Kupec was a former star QB and ran fund raising for the whole university.  While they were dating he hires her to work for him for $95,000 a year.  They then take a ton of trips to watch Ben Hansborough play for Notre Dame.  They charge those trips on Kupec's UNC business expense account.  Kupec wasn't able to get those trips retroactively approved and resigned.

[Box and Won]

11 hours ago, brianstl said:

One of my favorite parents getting a job stories is Hanborough's mom at UNC.  She got a fundraising job at UNC's dental school and got in trouble for spending UNC money to go see Tyler play on the road.  UNC later retroactively approved the trips as dental school fundraising activities.

Well after Tyler graduates she marries Matt Kupec.  Kupec was a former star QB and ran fund raising for the whole university.  While they were dating he hires her to work for him for $95,000 a year.  They then take a ton of trips to watch Ben Hansborough play for Notre Dame.  They charge those trips on Kupec's UNC business expense account.  Kupec wasn't able to get those trips retroactively approved and resigned.

I bet dad was thrilled with his son's decision to attend UNC.

[RiseAndGrind]

12 minutes ago, Box and Won said:

I bet dad was thrilled with his son's decision to attend UNC.

I'd never heard this story and I really enjoyed Brian's synopsis. 

[cgeldmacher]

23 hours ago, Quality Is Job 1 said:

Give me a break!  There is ABSOLUTELY nothing unethical about the situation.  The only way it's unethical is if no entertainer should ever be paid according to perceived value.

Professional sports is entertainment.  The top leagues pay their employees (athletes and coaches) high salaries in exchange for raising their commercial value and profitability.  Networks and advertising licensees also find a way to profit.  And the end consumers (the fans) derive value from the product — even if they don't want to pay ticket prices, they'll watch on television, boosting ratings that influence commercials.  Everyone is getting something they value in exchange for the products others are offering.  Moreover, the economics of the entertainment business, along with the perceived benefits of participating, cause young people to aspire to contribute in order to enter the circle themselves.  You see Jordan, with his wagging tongue, pitching his shoes, or whatever, and you want to see if you can do that too.  Anything unethical, yet?

So Michael Porter Sr. was a cager in his youth, but he didn't achieve the ultimate dream, but he did benefit from basketball in that it entwined him deeply in the game: romantically and familially.  After a detour into another culturally-sexy entertainment genre (rapping), he went back to his roots in basketball to try his hand in coaching.  Romar told him to get some experience.  So he interned at lower levels and then, thanks in large part to who he knows — his sister-in-law — got an entry-level position in Div. 1 college coaching.  While, sure, he has children that are the offspring of a basketball-centric environment, no one could possibly know that those kids would go on to have elite-level talent.  So Porter Sr. works his way up in a profession he loves, and it so happens his children are great at the sport.

And why do some of you — if not because of envy — balk at the amount of money that some schools offered Porter Sr. for his talents?  The schools are willing to pay that because they expect it will be well worth it.  They'll get greater exposure and have the chance to be better than ever before — and produce more revenue.  Who is not getting what they perceive is fair value?

And please don't tell me you would refuse to earn top dollar for what you provide out of your talents and experience if others are getting what they perceive to be a valuable result, because only a fool would do that.

+1  Maybe not with quite the fervor that you had, but sounds like the hypocrites finally got to you.  Each one of our assistant coaches was hired because they had a connection on a recruit.  Were we paying for the recruit?  Can't say for sure, but I can say Ford would not have hired them if they did not have an inside route to one or two recruits.

[Bills_06]

1 minute ago, cgeldmacher said:

+1  Maybe not with quite the fervor that you had, but sounds like the hypocrites finally got to you.  Each one of our assistant coaches was hired because they had a connection on a recruit.  Were we paying for the recruit?  Can't say for sure, but I can say Ford would not have hired them if they did not have an inside route to one or two recruits.

While this is true, the difference is you can say if one of the assistants gave the recruit they had the inside route to money, it would be an NCAA violation for coach giving an athlete money.  However if Porter Sr gives Porter Jr money or buys him stuff because of his nice new salary, isn't that just a parent giving his kid money?  Maybe this was discussed in this thread and there would be rules to it but I haven't really read through all the comments because I don't really care that Mizzou hired Porter Sr because lots of schools would have done the same thing, just the above post brought that thought to my mind.  

[cgeldmacher]

There are so many outside the rules recruiting problems at schools that calling someone unethical for doing something that is within the rules to get a recruit seems like just being shortsided against a program you don't like.

These situations always have two angles they can be seen from.  We (hire/steal) Tate away from Mizzou.  Tate gets us Gordon.  So, we got Gordon because (Tate is a good recruiter with local connections/we unethically paid for Gordon by paying Tate as an assistant to get him).

I have a bad taste in my mouth constantly about the state of college basketball recruiting, but if I am going to follow the Billikens, I have to recognize that it's just the process we have created.  Not the NCAA.  I hate when people blame the NCAA for being corrupt and then criticize it for its recruiting rules.  The NCAA would get disbanded before schools like Alabama, USC, North Carolina, Duke, Nebraska, Michigan, etc. etc. etc. allowed them to fundamentally change the rules to take away the competitive advantage they have in recruiting.

[HenryB]

12 minutes ago, cgeldmacher said:

+1  Maybe not with quite the fervor that you had, but sounds like the hypocrites finally got to you.  Each one of our assistant coaches was hired because they had a connection on a recruit.  Were we paying for the recruit?  Can't say for sure, but I can say Ford would not have hired them if they did not have an inside route to one or two recruits.

Comparing Porter Sr to any of our current assistants is absolutely ridiculous.  We hired career D1 coaches who in addition to recruiting responsibilities have coaching duties.  Porter Sr has exactly one duty...get his sons on campus.  And for that duty he is one of the highest paid assistants in the country.

[3star_recruit]

HenryB,

You honestly think our assistant coaches would have been hired without their prior connections to French, Goodwin and Gordon?

[hsmith19]

"Coach K does it too" is less a convincing way to claim the moral high ground than it is an admission of sleazy-but-legal behavior. Has been for quite a few years now. The next step is to make a huge bloviated deal out of when and how to retire numbers for one and doners.

[Quality Is Job 1]

1 hour ago, HenryB said:

Comparing Porter Sr to any of our current assistants is absolutely ridiculous.  We hired career D1 coaches who in addition to recruiting responsibilities have coaching duties.  Porter Sr has exactly one duty...get his sons on campus.  And for that duty he is one of the highest paid assistants in the country.

For some reason this notion you seem to have stuck in your head really rankles me, even though it really shouldn't affect me.  You take one brief, biased snapshot of Michael Porter Sr.'s life and decide he does nothing other than mooch off of "hitting the lottery" of his clan's rise to stardom.  I don't know if you're a father or not (I freely admit that I am not), but would it bother you if someone were to minimize and trivialize all that you've done in your life, including the years of love and instruction you've instilled in your kids, simply because they exceeded your accomplishments in the same field and attained a level of fame that makes them in highest demand?

Why can't you understand that Porter Sr. played ball before his children were born and when he broke into the profession (as a DBO, many coaches' starting point), no one could possibly know that any of his kids would be five-star-caliber recruits?  The boys were in — what? — middle school!  But you are conveniently ignoring that and acting as if Porter "woke up" last year and decided to get into coaching because he could get paid for bringing his children with him.

[ACE]

It is really strange that a so-called moderator on BILLIKENS.com has gotten more riled up defending the honor of the Mizzou coach than he ever has about any topic pertaining to the BILLIKENS.

[RiseAndGrind]

Pretty sure Coach Martin himself doesn't care about the opinions on billikens.com. 

Mizzou is trash and everything associated with Mizzou is trash. Therefore, Coach Martin is trash. 

The moment he stops being associated with Mizzou he will no longer be trash. 

Any questions?

[majerus mojo]

27 minutes ago, ACE said:

It is really strange that a so-called moderator on BILLIKENS.com has gotten more riled up defending the honor of the Mizzou coach than he ever has about any topic pertaining to the BILLIKENS.

people have a really hard time remembering what website they're on, it seems, in general. but self-awareness be damned when it comes to defending big state u

[Quality Is Job 1]

23 minutes ago, ACE said:

It is really strange that a so-called moderator on BILLIKENS.com has gotten more riled up defending the honor of the Mizzou coach than he ever has about any topic pertaining to the BILLIKENS.

Oh, please!  I've gotten more riled up about things that have nothing to do with Mizzou, and I've taken my share of grief for a number of stances that I've taken over the years.

And it's only your bias that compels you to see my posts as defending Mizzou.  That's not what I'm doing; I'm defending Michael Porter Sr.'s body of work and intentions -- not that I've ever met him.  It doesn't matter to me what school he's at; I take exception to the notion that he's not a legitimate coach.

And what does my being a moderator have to do with anything?  Am I supposed to refrain from expressing my opinions because I'm a moderator?  Also, I don't work for the school or athletics department, so I don't have to toe the company line.  Lastly, I have said NOTHING to denigrate or hurt the SLU program.  In fact, I feel I'm helping maintain a bit of balance against the potential external opinion that all SLU supporters are smug.... (fill in the blank).