No, Stanford coach David Shaw didn’t call your state stupid

1. The NCAA ended the years-long practice of letting college coaches work high school camps in far-away locales. While these camps were good for athletes, several conferences were mad about Jim Harbaugh making a show of them, and that’s the kind of brilliance you can expect from those in charge of this sport.

2. Since every coach is being asked about this, someone asked Stanford head coach David Shaw, a former Harbaugh assistant, over the weekend. Here is what he said:

I have no opinion. It’s never affected us. People do them, and people don’t do them. We’ve got great attendance at the camps we have here. We get a lot of guys we want to come.

But I didn’t like the way that a lot of people have put this as the SEC against Jim Harbaugh. That’s not what this has been about. Conference by conference, this has been going on for three-plus years, since Jim was with the 49ers. This has been a battle. As a conference, we had a long discussion three years ago about what we were going to do about satellite camps.

I’m great with whatever college football says, because it doesn’t affect us. It doesn’t make sense for us to go hold a camp some place where there might be one person in the entire state that’s eligible to get into Stanford.

Yesterday, I called this comment “a little too blunt,” but it’s still easy to decipher. Stanford has high academic standards, and even though every football program can fudge admissions for top recruits somewhat, that’s not gonna be enough to get the majority of players onto the Cardinal.

What sense would it make for Stanford to set up a camp in any faraway state if only a small handful of high school football players in the region would be likely to make it in anyway, which is the case for any region? If Stanford joins a big camp in Georgia (I’ll use my state as an example), should Shaw stand at the fence and collect transcripts, to save almost everyone the trouble?

3. Because of the way things are, this comment was framed as being a direct shot at the South and SEC states and the Southern way of life and Lewis Grizzard and WCW Starrcade and the Waffle House All-Star Special. Paul Finebaum’s team put “in SEC country” on this image, which flew around social media:

Well, maybe it partially was. Who knows. Many states have terrible education situations. But it was mostly about Stanford, a hard school to get into and a football program that can’t recruit en masse like big, public schools can.

He could’ve chosen better words than “one person,” in order to avoid sounding arrogant or dismissive of smaller and poorer states. His roster is about one-fifth Southern, so evidently there are plenty of players in the region worthy of his school. But “one person” is an exaggeration in service of a point. If he’d said “one top football player that year” instead, would that be fine?

And besides:

4. By this afternoon, someone will have Photoshopped David Shaw as General Sherman. This will be celebrated and assailed far and wide. One hour later, Harbaugh will do something to make everyone forget about this whole Shaw business, and then we can start over.

Elsewhere!

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Players are finally getting paid for old NCAA Football games. Soooooo let’s make new ones!

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King Cardale Jones fired off a series of tweets at the NCAA, as he does.

UCLA’s starting quarterback wore a “F*ck Trump” hat to Trump’s golf course, and everyone reacted! Boy, did they!