Two separate reports have come out in the last 36 hours.
The first indicates a culture of paying players that should surprise no one with respect to college football.
- Selena Roberts, on her website, Roopstigo.com, posted an article yesterday implicating much of the Auburn program (including then-defensive coordinator, now Florida head coach Will Muschamp) paying a number of players for various purposes, up to and including paying players to stay at Auburn for the national championship run.
- Additionally, Roberts reports that many of the players were nowhere near academically-eligible to play in the fated 2011 BCS National Championship Game, where Newton (probably illegal himself) and the Tigers defeated Oregon 22-19. Roberts' report states that three former players implicated nine players had to have their grades materially changed (some flagrantly) to be allowed to compete in the 2011 BCS National Championship Game.
It meant that Newton could be that next great media/machine hype-fest to get the #1 Draft Pick to go along with the Heisman AND the National Championship -- a National Championship in a year where the BCS solidified it's power and basically stated openly that no non-AQ school would ever play for the national title -- using Newton and Auburn as a nice shield to promote Newton, known dirty with the dealings of his father to get him to Auburn after his thefts at Florida and the like, to the NFL draft and the next step on the road of the American sports machine.
But that's not all ESPN has uncovered.
- Tonight, ESPN the Magazine and Shaun Assael report that a six-month investigation of the Auburn program indicated a dozen players had failed synthetic marijuana tests after their national championship, as Auburn only instituted tests on the subject after the Championship.
- One player, TE Dakota Mosley, failed SEVEN such tests, was never punished, and failed one just before he was to go in front of the NCAA for the whole recruiting mess that the NCAA was successful in sweeping under the rug.
- Mosley was brought before Gene Chizik, then the coach of Auburn, and told he could keep his spot on the team.
- The day after that meeting, Mosley and two other players committed an incident in which the three now stand charged with armed robbery. One of them, Antonio Goodman, was found guilty and got 15 years in prison for it.
- Star RB Michael Dyer was also one of the 12 who failed. 18 athletes were found to have failed by the University.
- Another dozen seniors (it was not clear whether these were also football players) used the drug and were never caught, according to Assael's investigation.
The good news is that I truly believe NO ONE can now claim, unless there is a concentrated witch hunt against Auburn and all of this is untrue, that the title was clean, whether or not the NCAA chooses to act.
The bad news is that this might well bite the hand that feeds the ownership of college football of ESPN.
Why?
Go back to what happened with respect to this "championship", as I stated above. The Auburn championship may have been the most important of the BCS pre-playoff era. It basically sealed the fates of the Boise States and TCUs and Hawaiis and Utahs of the previous few years -- that there would be no way that a BCS National Championship would be possible as long as the present hierarchy of college football continued to exist.
The problem, now, is that it's clear the whole thing was an utter and complete sham, on numerous levels.
But it now appears that ESPN is willing to help in the nullification of all this.
Is that going to sit well with the American Sports Machine?
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