We're going to apply one of our blog policies to the Miami scandal and try not to talk about it. It's just not something we really need to get mixed up in. But I did have one brief thought that does apply to USF:
In the piles and piles of allegations and evidence in the Nevin Shapiro story on Yahoo! Sports, Greg Auman somehow found this nugget in one of Dan Wetzel's columns on the topic. (Side note -- Wetzel's other column is hilariously headlined "Why Miami is in trouble." Oh, you think???)
Brooklyn born, he grew up in a middle-class home in Miami Beach, raised mostly by a single mother after a divorce. His stepfather was himself later busted for participating in a multi-million dollar fraud.
He attended the University of South Florida but never lost his boyhood allegiance to the Hurricanes, who he followed as a kid.
Shapiro is 42, so that would have meant he attended USF in the late 1980s, before football was seriously in the discussion. I usually get annoyed with students who come to my school and keep rooting for their old favorite college teams. But that doesn't seem to bother me very much in this case.
I don't think Shapiro would have had quite as much success trying to pull this off in Tampa. First of all, it would have been way too obvious. Second, USF's athletic department, for all its internal faults, has a pretty sharp compliance department. And third, I think Jim Leavitt would have reacted to players getting stuff from a slimeball like Shapiro the way Pete Bell did in "Blue Chips" once he figured out that Tony shaved points. It would have broken his brain.