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Adrian Peterson (official thread)

I always enjoy trying to flip these things around, so here is another take.

There are NCAA infractions where kids get suspended and the school has no say - as it should be. If the infraction causes you to go to the Texas game unprepared, that is just the way it is. Both the player and school suffer - which is the intent.

There are also internal infractions where the rules are decided by the coaches (rarely the school itself) and imposed by the coaches. That is what we have here.

The purpose of these rules are to punish the player, not the team. Exactly how does missing a game punish a player? Does missing a big game punish him more than missing a lesser game? Isn't it somewhat random whether the next game after the infraction is a big game or lesser game? If having a player out for a big game results in a loss wasn't an entire team punished inordinately for an infraction they did not commit (something like having everyone stay after school cause Johnny put Sally's hair in the ink well)? Interesting questions I think.

My point is that there is a good argument that a coach should have the leverage to determine when and how a player will be punished to minimize the punishment on the team while still punishing the player. Letting a player play in a big game and sit out the next lesser game is consistent with that. Exactly what is the problem?

Now, if the coaches own rule is clearly stated such that the player will miss the VERY NEXT game after an infraction is identified and he doesn't do so he is violating his own rule. But does anyone know what Stoop's rule is?

On the other hand, if we just want to take advantage of this opportunity to trash Stoops and OU I am all for it - carry on.
 
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I don't think there is very much wrong here. Troy Smiths was a 'big deal' because there was a possibility that it was something more, that he somehow recieved money for the expenses on the trip in such a way that it was an infraction.

To miss ONE day of class is nothing. In fact, about 70% of professors if not more anymore, allow up to three unexcused absences before penelty to their grade happens. For one, the potential penelty to grade should be enough punishment and students with academic scholorships don't go through anything like this for when they either accidently sleep through their class or just decide they need to take one off, because even the great students will do it on rare occasions.

As far as the 'if we need him' I can see that both ways... One it makes him look bad, as if he won't issue a suspension unless he is confident his team can otherwise win (however again in this situition i think he should see ZERO penelty) but it also does a positive, while he will likely start, AP has to go through the rest of the week with a bit of fear that if Ok.. turns it up this week and play fine without him, that he might have to sit some time out, which no star player will want to do.

We need to be crying at the media, not Stoops for this for turning this into a big deal.
The way he handled his qb...that deserved a bit of news though.
Well... thats my 2 cents.
 
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I remember in the summer Tressel was asked about suspensions and he said something like, "I don't belong to the school of thought that the length of a suspension depends on the quality of a kids backup." I think that was right after the Ernie Sims incident at FSU.
 
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I'm in need of schooling... are there any rules about how many classes must be attended in order to play in the game on saturday? I don't think it applies here, but I thought there was some rule about horrendous attendance jeopardizing eligibility? Maybe I'm just thinking of the FSU QB who slept thru his final...
 
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I'm in need of schooling... are there any rules about how many classes must be attended in order to play in the game on saturday? I don't think it applies here, but I thought there was some rule about horrendous attendance jeopardizing eligibility? Maybe I'm just thinking of the FSU QB who slept thru his final...

That is all handled by individual schools. The only factor the NCAA deals with is the eligibility in terms of credits and GPA
 
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I always enjoy trying to flip these things around, so here is another take.

There are NCAA infractions where kids get suspended and the school has no say - as it should be. If the infraction causes you to go to the Texas game unprepared, that is just the way it is. Both the player and school suffer - which is the intent.

There are also internal infractions where the rules are decided by the coaches (rarely the school itself) and imposed by the coaches. That is what we have here.

The purpose of these rules are to punish the player, not the team. Exactly how does missing a game punish a player? Does missing a big game punish him more than missing a lesser game? Isn't it somewhat random whether the next game after the infraction is a big game or lesser game? If having a player out for a big game results in a loss wasn't an entire team punished inordinately for an infraction they did not commit (something like having everyone stay after school cause Johnny put Sally's hair in the ink well)? Interesting questions I think.

My point is that there is a good argument that a coach should have the leverage to determine when and how a player will be punished to minimize the punishment on the team while still punishing the player. Letting a player play in a big game and sit out the next lesser game is consistent with that. Exactly what is the problem?

Now, if the coaches own rule is clearly stated such that the player will miss the VERY NEXT game after an infraction is identified and he doesn't do so he is violating his own rule. But does anyone know what Stoop's rule is?

On the other hand, if we just want to take advantage of this opportunity to trash Stoops and OU I am all for it - carry on.

Good question but I have always went by the motto you win as a team you lose as a team. One guy messes up the team messes up.

I know he just missed a couple of classes which isnt really that bad, but I think people just love to trash OU b/c they were the media sweathearts the last couple years.
 
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By Skip Bayless
Page 2

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A confession: I bleed crimson.

OU crimson.

I can't help it. I was born into the University of Oklahoma's football tradition. I grew up in Oklahoma City, and my grandfather took me to my first OU game when I was 5 years old.

I got to go that day only because none of my older cousins wanted to sit through yet another Sooners romp. The opponent, a Notre Dame team that had just lost at home to Navy, was almost a three-touchdown underdog in Norman.

That dark day, Notre Dame ended Bud Wilkinson's 47-game winning streak, 7-0. That record will never be broken, but my young heart was. Several shrinks have concluded that my traumatic OU baptism still triggers the opinions that enrage some readers.

Here I go again.

<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=5 rowSpan=2><SPACER width="5" type="block" height="1"></TD><TD width=195>
050915_peterson1_195.jpg
</TD></TR><TR><TD style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 3px; LINE-HEIGHT: 13px" width=195>[FONT=verdana, arial, geneva]Oklahoma needs Adrian Peterson in order to win -- and isn't that what they're supposed to do?[/FONT]</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>Opinion: If Bob Stoops punishes Adrian Peterson for missing class by not starting him in Saturday's game at UCLA, I'll be even more disappointed in Stoops than I already am.

Stoops isn't the country's highest paid coach because of his team's academic achievements. No, Stoops makes upper-echelon NFL money because he has beaten Texas five straight times and finished the last five seasons by winning a Cotton and a Rose Bowl and playing for three national championships.

As an OU fan, I don't care if OU players are required to attend a single class, and I don't want my coach jeopardizing our chances to win because of a ridiculously strict new attendance requirement.

Confession No. 2: I graduated cum laude from Vanderbilt with a double major in English and history. But I wouldn't be upset if Vandy dropped football and basketball. I went there to get an education, and I'm proud to say I got a great one.

Why should I brag to friends that my school tries to recruit athletes who often choose Vanderbilt only for the opportunity to play in the SEC? Some of these athletes barely qualify as students, and many wouldn't have chosen Vanderbilt if not for full athletic scholarships.
It's called Vanderbilt University.

Yes, I'm mildly interested -- and, OK, a little proud -- that this year's Commodores opened with wins at Wake Forest and Arkansas. Thanks mostly to quarterback Jay Cutler, who could be a first-round pick, my school has a chance to go 6-5.

But I won't lose a second of sleep if they don't.

My Sooners are a different story. My God, they're in danger of going 6-5.
Many in my home state attach their self-images to the fame and fortunes of a college team that serves the purpose of the pro team they don't have. This started around 1946, when OU's Board of Regents decided to beef up the football program in response to John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath," which inaccurately portrayed Oklahoma as one big, backward dust bowl.

Oklahomans, the regents believed, needed something to be proud of. Steinbeck later admitted his only firsthand knowledge of the state was driving through it once on the way from California to New York. Yet his book inspired many "Oranges of Wrath" -- many Orange Bowl visits for OU, and seven national championships, including the one Stoops won with the 2000 team.


Of course, Steinbeck's book also helped fuel scandal upon OU scandal, from Wilkinson's slush fund to what Barry Switzer called the "rapin', dopin' and shootin'" of players who hastened the fall of his chicken-fried Rome after three national titles.


Am I proud of the corruption? No -- though I shrug off some of the players' misbehavior as the predictable product of teenagers' being idolized as star gladiators. But I have no ivy-covered illusions about my Sooners. I don't need to cling to the Chip Hilton fantasy of student-athletes attending English and history classes on Friday and winning one for Dear Old U on Saturday.


No, I readily accept that many football players consider OU mostly a proving ground for the NFL. If they want to attend classes -- and want to excel academically -- that's great …


… as long as they excel on the field.


To me, they're little more than unpaid pro football players, and it's absurdly unrealistic to expect they can put in the necessary hours on the practice field and in the weight and treatment rooms and still attend every class.

<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=5 rowSpan=2><SPACER width="5" type="block" height="1"></TD><TD width=195>
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</TD></TR><TR><TD style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 3px; LINE-HEIGHT: 13px" width=195>[FONT=verdana, arial, geneva]Stoops is already under fire this season -- sitting Peterson won't help.[/FONT]</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>If you live and die with any of the traditional football powers, and you claim you do care that your players also are dedicated students, you're lying to me or yourself.


I'm offering up the raw truth here.


I'm stripping myself bare of any holier-than-thou sports columnist tendencies and publicly admitting I do root for one team and do not care if its Heisman Trophy candidate recently missed three classes. All that matters to me is that Adrian Peterson is as dedicated a football player, on the practice field and in the weight room, as has ever walked that campus. No Sooner has ever run with such consistent and relentless fury.


If Peterson hadn't turned an ankle, OU almost certainly would have avoided being upset (like my stomach) at home by TCU (which extended that Maalox Moment by losing to SMU the following Saturday). Without Peterson's 220 yards on 32 carries, Stoops would be on the talk-radio hot seat after being devastated at home by Tulsa -- which led 9-7 late in the third quarter.

And now Peterson has fallen victim to a new academic rule ramrodded by Stoops? Where does he think he's coaching, Vanderbilt?


Stoops encouraged the athletic department to decree that if an athlete misses three classes in one subject, he gets a warning. After one more missed class in any subject, he must miss two practices. And after one more missed class in any subject, he must miss a competition.


So one more miss this semester and Stoops' meal ticket misses a game. After Peterson was forced to miss practices on Monday and Tuesday, Stoops wasn't required to further punish him -- or even to announce that Peterson had been disciplined.


Yet Stoops told the media he's considering not starting Peterson at UCLA. So he unnecessarily humiliated his star to what -- motivate him? To defuse potential rumors about his absence from practice?


Or did Stoops seize this opportunity to show that his program is not turning into Switzer's?


In his Wednesday column, the Daily Oklahoman's Berry Tramel posed the polar-opposite question I'm asking. Tramel wondered if Stoops is getting too soft. Tramel basically concluded the answer is no.


But he weighed the evidence: Rhett Bomar, the No. 1 quarterback recruit in the country two years ago, cited for underage drinking the night before he was handed the starting job ahead of the Tulsa game … star defensive tackle Dusty Dvoracek being kicked off the team last year after an alcohol-fueled assault, then allowed back this season … two offensive linemen quitting, then recently being allowed to return, then quitting again … and whispers that many players yawned their way through offseason conditioning.


Enough of that stuff will eat away at a Top 10 program's foundation.

Yet Stoops' response has been to crack the class-attendance whip -- to cut off his upturned nose to spite his face.


He and Sooners officials defend their get-tough rules by saying Tennessee and Florida have adopted similar attendance policies. "In the end," Stoops said of his players, "they are here to go to school, and it should be our job as administrators and coaches that if they're not, we can't put [them] on the field."


Please, Bob, enough of the student-athlete hypocrisy. Your job is to win football games, period.


And Stoops mostly has done that. Some schools would give up spring break to have him as their coach.


But the man continues to shake my fickle faith in him because when his teams have been bad, they have been very, very bad. They've lost two games to archrival Oklahoma State, one in Norman and one blowout loss in Stillwater. What was being hailed in 2003 as Oklahoma's "greatest team ever" was annihilated by Kansas State 35-7 in the Big 12 title game, then stunk it up against LSU in the national championship game. And last January, USC's Pete Carroll and Norm Chow coached rings -- championship rings -- around Stoops and his staff in what turned out to be as big a big-game mismatch as college football has ever seen.


For me, USC 55, OU 19 was even more psychologically scarring than Notre Dame 7, OU 0. USC could have scored 100 if it had wanted.


Now this: The early line had Oklahoma favored by 7½ points at UCLA. Now the Sooners are a 6½-point underdog.


Now word out of Norman is that Stoops' staff is split over the offense being run by coordinator Chuck Long -- and that Stoops, a defensive coach, is getting more involved in the offense.


That's scary.


Call me a spoiled rotten OU fan. But the last thing Bob Stoops should be worrying about right now is whether Adrian Peterson attends class.

Skip Bayless can be seen Monday through Friday on "Cold Pizza," ESPN2's morning show, and at 4 p.m. ET on ESPN's "1st & 10." His column appears twice a week on Page 2. You can e-mail Skip here.

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I didn't think that I could possibly like Skip Clueless any less - until I read that article. What a joke - as a self-prcolaimed "holier-than-thou sports columnist", he would be the first guy to rip on some other school for its indiscretions. And BTW, thanks for perpetuating the implicitly racist stereotype that athletes are too stupid to attend classes, and that it's perfectly okay for them to be indentured servants of the colleges, earning billions for the schools while receiving four years of room and board in return. Maybe the whole state of Oklahoma isn't "one big, backward dust bowl", but Skip Clueless's mind certainly is.
 
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Did Mr. Clueless make up that part about OU beefing up its sports as a response to the Grapes of Wrath? It seems pretty stupid that someone at a university would take a NOVEL's depiction of Oklahoma 20 years prior that seriously...and that they would think the same people liking that novel would be impressed by football.

This is one of the worst articles Skip has ever written...is he really that full of himself? That hypocritical? (The answer is yes :wink:)

Edit: Post #500, and Bayless and Michigan still suck
 
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Thanks for the Ammo Skippy

Man, where does one start? It looks like it might need an Atomic Force Microscope to measure the depth of Skippy's mind.

In one page of whining, crying and braying Bayless leaves on the table more rhetorical ammunition to point up his future inconsistencies. It would be great to preserve this little vignette of self-indulgent ignorance. Then, whenever Skippy goes on another of his tirades there are ready made retorts, from his own pen, with which to point out his complete and utter lack of intellectual honesty.

The fact is whether Skippy likes it or not the new APR rules demand that student-athletes place emphasis on both parts of that compound name. And, though Stoops' manner of expressing this earlier in the week was wishy-washy I applaud him for actually taking (now) a firmer stand. You set rules, they only mean something if you impose them. Furthermore, though there may - in the past - have been situations where players got little in the way of education beyond the football practice sessions, that did not make it right.

Skippy is in sum either delusional, living in the past, simply a man without a real conscience, or all three .. I'll leave it to you dear reader to guess which one I think it is.

Now onto the rhetorical ammo ..

If he berates a team for failing to control its players use this, one might even change the university affiliation - to make it completely generic:
Of course, Steinbeck's book also helped fuel scandal upon (add Univeristy name) scandal, from Wilkinson's slush fund to what (add coach name) called the "rapin', dopin' and shootin'" of players who hastened the fall of his chicken-fried Rome after three national titles.


Am I proud of the corruption? No -- though I shrug off some of the players' misbehavior as the predictable product of teenagers' being idolized as star gladiators. But I have no ivy-covered illusions about my (add team nickname). I don't need to cling to the Chip Hilton fantasy of student-athletes attending English and history classes on Friday and winning one for Dear Old U on Saturday.

If he challenges another teams fans about the academic standing of their players:
No, I readily accept that many football players consider (insert university name here) mostly a proving ground for the NFL. If they want to attend classes -- and want to excel academically -- that's great …


… as long as they excel on the field.


To me, they're little more than unpaid pro football players, and it's absurdly unrealistic to expect they can put in the necessary hours on the practice field and in the weight and treatment rooms and still attend every class.

Or this priceless gem:

If you live and die with any of the traditional football powers, and you claim you do care that your players also are dedicated students, you're lying to me or yourself.
 
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as i read Skip's article, i found myself scrolling upwards, and towards the rep button in order to ding the author... then i realized that dinging 44820 was not really what i wanted to do...

man i wish i could ding Skip Clueless... what a fucking tool...

how i wish i could kick his dumb ass down a long flight of stairs!
 
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Might as well not even require the players to attend any classes at all...it just gets in the way of their real priorities, like weight-lifting and football practice. :roll1:

Even if OU puts 4-5 players a year into the NFL (16-20 in a normal four-year cycle), where does that leave the other 65-60 scholarship players? He emphasizes the word "University" in "Vanderbilt University", but fails to remember OU stands for Oklahoma University.

The NCAA has their sometimes-ridiculous rules for exactly this reason, and that is that there are many who think college football players aren't really students at all.
 
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Might as well not even require the players to attend any classes at all...it just gets in the way of their real priorities, like weight-lifting and football practice. :roll1:

Even if OU puts 4-5 players a year into the NFL (16-20 in a normal four-year cycle), where does that leave the other 65-60 scholarship players? He emphasizes the word "University" in "Vanderbilt University", but fails to remember OU stands for Oklahoma University.

The NCAA has their sometimes-ridiculous rules for exactly this reason, and that is that there are many who think college football players aren't really students at all.
actually OU stands for "University of Oklahoma," which in itself is an indictment of the quality of education one receives from that ass-backwards school...
 
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One more and done.

Peterson says major injury would mean return to OU
Sooner running back still wants national championship, Heisman Trophy and Billy Sims' rushing record


NORMAN ? Adrian Peterson said Monday the only thing certain that would keep him at Oklahoma another season would be a major injury.
The junior running back is looking to rush for 2,200 yards this season and shatter Billy Sims' OU record. He wants to win the Heisman Trophy. And he'd like another crack at the national title.
But Peterson said if doesn't accomplish those goals this season, he may never have another chance.
"My goals when I got here were win a national championship first and then have an opportunity to win the Heisman," Peterson said.
"Those are things I want to do, but the only thing right now I know for a fact that would keep me back next year is a major injury. God willing, that won't happen."
To anyone who has followed Peterson's career at OU, the possibility of the superstar leaving early should come as no surprise.
He rushed for a freshman NCAA-record 1,925 yards. He placed second in the Heisman voting ? highest ever by a frosh ? and was a consensus All-American. At the time, it seemed certain he would turn pro as soon as he was able.
But after an injury-riddled sophomore campaign, Peterson decided it best to return to Oklahoma for his junior year. Through two games he's gained 304 yards.
His 3,337 career yards rushing leave him 781 yards shy of Billy Sims' school record.
"Anything could happen," Peterson said. "I've just got to take it game by game. It's all going to depend on how I feel. The career rushing record. (Billy Sims') rushing record. Sometimes I think, ?It's a once in a lifetime opportunity to do that. Once you leave, there's no coming back.' "I've just got a lot to think about. It will be a hard decision."

http://newsok.com/article/2845898/
 
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