Dead Program Walking

Looks like there are 72 more reasons to hate South Beach even more in the sports world. Nevin Shapiro, a former booster for the Miami or the U, has told Yahoo Sports that he provided at least 72 players with improper benefits from 2002 to 2010. These improper benefits include a variety of things including access to a house and yachts, paying players for bounties earned during games, and even providing players prostitutes. Of the names mentioned, many notable NFL stars have been named including Devin Hester, Jon Beason, and Vince Wilfork. What makes this worse is that Shapiro said the university seemed to be aware of his activity saying at least 6 coaches knew about his activities as well as 10 athletic department employees at most.

Now Shapiro does seem less than credible considering he is serving a 20 year prison sentence for running a Ponzi scheme. However Yahoo has backed up the claims pretty well interviewing over 100 people and getting corroboration from 21 people about these allegations including 9 former players or recruits and a former coach. There is also a lot of paper work from Shapiro that backs this up with financial statements and cell phone logs and there is even over 1000 photos proving his involvement.

WOW!!! This makes USC and Ohio State look like jaywalkers. I don't know where to start. To be honest, this thing seems so overwhelmingly awful for the U and College Football that it's making me giddy. That's right, like a school boy. This is a hurricane (HA HA) of alleged infractions for the U and just proves further that the amateur system in college athletics is broken and needs to be torn down and restarted from the ground up.

As for what will happen to the U, the worst punishment imaginable for a program might be considered: the Death Penalty. There seems to be a possibility that the football program could be killed for a season or two. The famous Death Penalty instance in the past has been the SMU Football scandals and having there 1987 season killed. If the U gets the Death Penalty, which does look likely now, the program will undoubtedly go from prestigious to borderline Division II. Their history will mean nothing anymore and everything that has been put into building this program will be torn down.

P.S. Allegations mentioned also included some in the basketball program.