Of Admissions and Sports Beauty

Coach Spurrier, who is your coach if you have any sense of goodness or aesthetic appreciation, expressed his thinly veiled disgust with the obstructionism of USC administration today in preventing NCAA-qualifying athletes admission to the university. One might speculate that members of the vast anti-Spurrier conspiracy have infiltrated USC's ranks. I hope this is not the case. Rather, it seems that like the administration may have become misguided and too self-important like the Coaches poll personnel. SOS took the opportunity to address the injustice:

"Again, I've got to apologize to two young men that we recruited and they qualified, they signed with us in February, and they were denied admission to our school. Personally, I don't think that's the way you do business. I'm embarrassed that I, and our coaches, basically misled these young men into believing they were coming here. Now, I'm not blasting the president or the provost. The president has already told me how we're going to change how we do admissions here, but I think we need to get it out to the high school coaches and the players out there that this is not going to happen again. As a head coach, one of the big things I've always tried to follow, in a player-coach relationship, honesty has to be the centerpiece of everything you have to do with your players. And it starts when you recruit them. I don't always tell recruits what they want to hear. I try to be honest with them and all I ever guarantee is an opportunity. And when you tell a young man that if he qualifies he's coming to your school and it doesn't happen, somebody is misleading, and it's me. I'm the guy. The head coach is the face of every college football program. It's my fault. It's nobody else's fault but mine. ... As long as I'm the coach here, we're going to take guys that qualify. If not, then I'm going to have to go somewhere else because I can't tell a young man you come to school here, he qualifies, and not do that. And we did that this year."

For those of you who don't know, some of USC's most highly-touted recruits have not been allowed to enroll in classes, despite committing to Coach Spurrier earlier this year and last year to play football for the Gamecocks -- and Greater Gator Nation. This is terribly unfair to the students and to Coach Spurrier. The athletes need to meet a minimum threshold of NCAA requirements and Coach Spurrier is empowered with some flexibility in the recruits he goes for. But losses such as the talented Akeem Auguste are heavy. I suppose they will make his pending SEC Championship season all the more special, against even more odds than normal.

And for those of you who support USC's denial of athletes because they are jealous that athletes who might have test scores below the school's average, or below their own, get scholarships to attend fine universities while they had to work, let me say this: grow up. Physical discipline is an important part of making a well-rounded, adjusted individual. Many of these athletes have extraordinary physical discipline, and/or have attained it so that they might live better lives, something you can surely identify with.

Consider, too, how athletics ties in with the mission of this blog. Athletics can often be a beautiful thing. In the case of Coach Spurrier's brand of football, it approaches the sublime. Plato, not an inconsiderable thinker one might say, believed athletics could show something akin to transcendent beauty, relating to the sacrifice on the part of the athlete for the performance, in itself a sacrifice for our benefit.

Let the athletes into USC, and all of us shall be enriched by it -- give Coach Spurrier the tools he need to paint his magnum opus: a National Championship at USC.

Sublime ballplays #1
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