Posted by seble on 6/5/2012 1:47:00 PM (view original):
When I look at gifts at a high level they don't really make sense. If a team successfully sways a player with gifts, then any other schools pursuing that player legitimately are getting screwed. If the gift attempt fails and the giver gets caught, the penalties are pretty severe and may encourage the coach to stop playing in that world because of all the time required to recover. So either way, someone is usually getting screwed. I don't think that's a good concept to have in a game like this.
To me, your second sentence in the post above is THE best rid to get rid of boosters entirely. Getting caught using boosters ultimately hurts several teams. The team that got caught (obviously), but it probably messed up at least one other team's recruiting that season, as they ended up wasting money on the player that they could have used to try to sign someone else.
Then you have the rest of the teams that the booster team has on his schedule. If the penalties are severe enough, the booster team will have to foreit all of his games up to that point (this has happened to me once, but just once. I learned my lesson quickly). Now all the teams on his schedule will take a big hit to both their RPI and SOS, since they now have a winless team with probably at least a dozen losses on their schedule/resume, thus damaging THEIR chances for a postseason bid. In real life, a committee can take this into account, but here, with a computer simply looking at numbers, it really, really hurts. Probably my biggest argument for just getting rid of boosters altogether.