well, i have read this damn thing, so may as well throw my 2 cents in.
i personally believe fishing for information is cheating and should not be allowed. i think doing it under another alias is even worse. if you think something is allowed, man up, and do it under your own name.
as far as girt being bladog or whatever, i can't speculate. girt is all in all a pretty good guy. and he really values competition. so i tend to think he wouldnt do something that he thought was cheating.
i do think girt likes to sitemail though, and is big on information exchange, so i wouldn't be shocked if he didnt see a problem with fishing for info. its at least in the realm of possibility. so what i would do jp is to have talked to him privately. ive always liked and respected you, but i don't think you went the right route here - you should talk to him privately first. let him know your concerns, and see if you can reach a consensus on what is collusion and what is not. best to approach it from an intellectual standpoint. ive often found that coaches in violation simply have not really thought about it, and are happy to have an open and honest discussion afterwards.
the simple reality that many coaches come to is, its damn near impossible to talk during recruiting without at least pushing the line. so many coaches won't talk at all. that kind of sucks, and a lot of coaches don't like that, so they talk but try to be careful. ive done that, and unintentionally sort of maybe crossed the line. nothing serious but i think most coaches have at some point unintentionally done something, that after careful consideration, they would not do again. it happens, and i think while it may technically count as cheating, there is a huge difference between that and intentionally cheating. its very possibly the case that the coach in question just simply unintentionally crossed the line, so that is why id take it up privately, when it happens and talk it over. ive found that only 10% of the time or less is the guy REALLY a cheating bastard. 90% of the time its a mostly harmless and unintentional transgression, and the coach is understanding and probably tries to avoid it in the future.
let me give you an example. i might be mixing 2 examples, they happened around the same time. girt, as it so happens, was my conference mate, and knew my interest in the game was heavily waning and i missed a bunch of recruiting. i stated i would merely try again next season, and he sent me a sitemail letting me know there were good players out there, and that while he trusted my ability to find them, i was giving up too early and he was happy to share some names of players i could consider for the good of the conference. he was 100% done recruiting. i think all in all, thats a pretty damn harmless intention. i only bring it up because i strongly believe that is the case. i ended up refusing the offer, i almost accepted it, but after more experience with HD than i care to have, my gut told me i should think about it. turns out the harmless request would involve him implicitly sharing FSS data with me - the players he would recommend surely he had FSS data on, and i did not. so i politely thanked him, and said no thanks. he replied that he saw where i was coming from, that he hadn't considered that and was just trying to help, and that i did in fact end up finding one of the players he had in mind anyway. no harm done. similar things have happened to me at least a dozen times and i just cant say enough how much more smoothly they went than when you publicly call a coach out. i tried that once... was a case of horribly explicit collusion, by a known dirty player, and STILL it didnt end up the way you would expect (people bashing him for cheating... maybe him being outcast somewhat for such a bad case of cheating... instead it somehow turned into a question of if i cheated by having multiple teams or some other sillyness).
11/21/2011 5:24 PM (edited)