Yet again, too many coincidences stacked on one another for this to just be some terrible recruiting by a fill-in for TCU's coach. And yet again, WIS fails to recognize the fact that you can only have so many coincidences stacked together before it's no longer a coincidence.
If they are trying to run off some of their best and longest-tenured coaches with their bungling of these "investigations," then they are doing a better job at that than they do even administering their own game.
I don't know who's-who in this scenario and I probably never will. I don't feel comfortable pointing fingers at anyone - perhaps because I don't have the information that 2000champou has; or perhaps simply because whatever information does exist doesn't achieve the minimum standards for actual proof.
What I AM certain of, is that someone clearly targeted his recruiting class with specific designs on ruining it. It is simply NOT the case that:
1. A D-IA non-BCS team should be pursing more than two, maybe three, prospects that even the D-II National Champ can see. Even if they were late to the party and/or had a fill-in who was literally the worst recruiter you can imagine doing it for them.
AND
2. A D-IA non-BCS team that was pursuing more than the above two/three D-II recruits would pursue them all *from the same D-II team*. Yes, the D-II NC will see the best D-II recruits (the ones with the best chance of having even slight appeal to a D-IA school), but that team is NOT the only one with max vision. It is 100% not the case that only the NC has max vision.
AND
3. A D-IA non-BCS team would pursue ALL of his D-II recruits from well over 1,000 miles away from his campus, ALL in the same small geographic region of the US. Nope. Sorry.
AND
4. A D-IA non-BCS team would not pursue some D-IAA Undecideds, at least in addition to but more likely instead of, prior to dipping to D-II.
AND
5. That D-IA non-BCS team would then hold out his last remaining scholarship and not sign it, even when some of those D-II recruits were Green to him, through the final cycle of recruiting and force himself to take a SimAI recruit unnecessarily.
For the math-literate among us, let's say for the sake of pure simplicity that all of the above had a 50/50 chance of happening (or not happening). Bear with me, please, because I know those chances are skewed horribly from reality. Also assume all five events are statistically independent of one-another, which I believe is a close enough approximation. In that case, there is a 1-in-32 (two to the fifth power) chance that all five would simultaneously occur. That's just over 3%.
That's already suspicious enough to warrant investigation, but not cosmically impossible. But the reality is that there aren't 50/50 chances of each happening. I'd say if we were to theoretically look at the data since the beginning of WIS, there's a less than 5% chance of any of those five things happening, independent of one another. Even that feels really high to me, but I'll error on the side of coincidence. So... what's twenty to the fifth power?
3.2 million
1 in 3.2 million that it's coincidence and that the fill-in was horrible and made all these "coincidental" mistakes.
Nah.