guys... simmer down now. you guys are all apparently too new of coaches to know that what tanner is talking about happened *all the time* in old HD. thats why so many long timers are so adamant about having a hard-line policy, no sharing of any information whatsoever, except possibly for mentoring situations where its extremely unlikely that exchange of recruiting information could help either coach (outside of the mentoring itself).
i think its pretty ridiculous to crucify tanner for this when dozens if not hundreds of coaches participated in this back in the day. its already common knowledge, in the sense that its openly known this happened, not in the sense that everyone knows it (think, the literary definition of common knowledge). oldresorter in particular spent a great deal of effort convincing the game's creator to create fair play guidelines. so maybe rather than criticize tanner, send oldresorter a line thanking him for his part in stopping that madness.
as to the GLV comments, there were definitely inter conference battles, and every time anyone made a comment about not battling in conference, i went on this long diatribe about how even though i generally would never poach in conference (i never said i wouldn't battle in conference), it wasn't ok to explicitly agree. to my knowledge, no explicit agreement was ever made by anyone. however, there was definitely a group mentality in the conference, we wanted to be the best conference in d2 anywhere (and we were, by a lot). i can only remember one or two poaching situations, but there were battles. on a somewhat related note, the one time i did poach in conference, it resulted in a massive backlash, including death threads (the guy was crazy, but after he wouldn't let go of a guy in an early battle that he had no shot of winning, i may have been a bit brutal in my response, to make a point - it was earlier in my career, and the recruiting framework was substantially different than it is today, insofar as those kinds of tactics were possible). although, i never did actually sign the guys i "poached", i had zero intention of signing those crappy players, it was all about making a point. still, i certainly didn't try to tell others they weren't allowed to do that or anything. but anyway, a lot of really great coaches came through there and we had some great rivalries, and not a lot but some in conference battles (although almost never any poaching, especially in the days of my heavy mentoring). one time in d1 one of those coaches asked me if a guy who appeared to be a backup target was actually a backup target, and it kind of ruined HD for me for a while, because it was a guy who i respected so much... but then again, it was the least bad of about 10 collusive sitemails from that time period, and maybe i was a little harsh on him. it was possibly my worst moment in HD though, and at least top 2, i would never have been able to take pride in the mighty GLV if there were shady dealings going on.
for the record, the GLV getting so strong made it drastically harder for me to individually be successful. it was good for the conference, but bad for individual championships, because there were *so* many high end teams and so many top coaches. this was before the projection report changes when it was almost impossible to send more than 6 teams to the NT, out of lower division conferences, so the super conferences you see in some places today are really far easier to build than it was back then... we had guys with multiple championships failing to make the NT almost every season, because they couldn't make it to .500. i knew that would happen up front, and i also had declining interest which multiplied things, but it was only the fun of the competition that made being in a conference like that worth it - from a championships standpoint, it was awful.
5/9/2014 8:55 PM (edited)