Posted by umpikes on 8/1/2012 5:28:00 PM (view original):
Girtie and Corn are wrong...but we can agree to disagree. What bothered me was the fact that you called out someone Corn for something far less insidious that what you did...it's just hypocritical. You didn't mention that in your earlier post yourself. If you don't want to call it cheating, what is it then when someone gets screwed out of a player when we're playing this game for money/credits?
umpikes - there's a disconnect in your logic, and - despite rereading and revising the statements below multiple times - i don't know if i can clearly articulate my thoughts. if someone else gets what i'm saying, maybe they can iron it out for me.
booster gifts: this was an option for EVERYONE to use. so, to say that using booster gifts was insidious because
"someone gets screwed out of a player..." is really a bad description. in the case of booster gifts, both coaches had the same option available to them, and one deciding that the risk/reward was worth pursuing. the fact that the other coach didn't make that same "business decision" was the non-booster coach's choice.
using battle information: when two coaches are in a battle for a player, both coaches gain (what should be) knowledge exclusive to each other about roughly how much the other coach is spending on that recruit. based on distance, conference success and open scholarships, the more talented coaches can have a pretty good estimate of how much that coach has spent from his budget and can then legitimately target the other coach's recruits, based on a risk/reward analysis (albeit a different one from the booster analysis). if a third coach is watching the battle and presumes that the two coaches are at war and probably spending all their hard earned recruiting dollars on the one stud recruit, the third coach might target one of the two battling coach's other recruits. the battling coach whose recruit is targeted gets, for lack of a better phrase "screwed out of a player". people may have differing views on the ethics of sniping (and i'm not arguing one way or the other about it), but this is completely within the terms of service and in neither of the examples above (battling coach targeting a second recruit of the second battling coach; or a third coach targeting a second recruit of one of the battling coaches) did anyone do anything violating the TOS or "insidious".
sharing battling information: when two coaches are in a battle for a player, both coaches gain (what should be)
knowledge exclusive to each other about roughly how much the other coach is spending on that recruit. sharing that (exclusive) information - or even confirming it even if it easily presumable for the reasons stated above - is "cheating" or more appropriately, a violation of the TOS. similarly, and perhaps less offensive, if a coach is on the outside and presumes that two coaches are really giving each other hell and comments on it, it is "cheating" and a violation of the TOS because each coach is expected to come to his or her (really?) own analyses and/or conclusions about recruiting efforts, money spent and remaining, etc.
what distinguishes boosters from sharing is that the former was a tool available to everyone from the get go; the latter information, or confirmation of the information, was NOT available to anyone but the two coaches battling, or in the case of a third party sharing the info, putting everyone on notice about information that is the responsibility of any coach wanting it to discover for themselves.