Went back and forth on whether this was Football or Recruiting. Finally landed on Football because it has implications far beyond just recruiting.
There's an article in today's Wall Street Journal, written by Harriet Ryan, about the wreck that high school pay-for-play brought onto Phillip Bell, III.
Bell is now a freshman at tOSU. But the article concentrates on his high school experience. It's long, has several supporting storylines, and would be impossible to summarize here.
The greatly simplified version is that every adult in Phillip Bell's life failed him. To a person, including his mother, they were putting a kid in the position of being family breadwinner, beginning when he was 14 or 15 years old. The money he brought in (both legitimate endorsements and pure pay-for-play -- which is against California HS rules) was used to fund a lavish lifestyle for the adults including drugs, alcohol and incessant partying.
In addition to being a 4-star talent at WR, Bell is apparently a bright kid and was making good grades until his family relocated from the San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles, where the home life caused him to go to Fs. How he got into tOSU isn't addressed. But given that academic performance, it might be an interesting side story.
There's no way that Bell's coaches didn't know about all this. But they had their own agendas, needing Bell's talents on the football field.
Today, Bell's mother is dead due to a combination of diabetes and acute cocaine toxicity, and he is estranged from his entire family -- father's side, mother's side, all grandparents, uncles, aunts, and half-siblings. From what I can infer, his "family" is his agent, along with a friend of his deceased mother -- whose motivations strike me as suspect.
It's a newspaper article, so I'm confident that the extent of the exploitation is an outlier and makes for a gripping story. I'm also confident that it's common as dirt in only slightly lesser degrees.
Here's a link to the article. It is long, but worth the reading time.
If you don't have a subscription, it'll be behind a paywall. But there are still hard copies available out there, and this article alone would make the single-issue price money well spent.
The status quo is unsustainable. A union / management / CBA structure might help college football, but I'm not sure how or whether that could address HS-level garbage like this in a manner that would stand up in court.
There's an article in today's Wall Street Journal, written by Harriet Ryan, about the wreck that high school pay-for-play brought onto Phillip Bell, III.
Bell is now a freshman at tOSU. But the article concentrates on his high school experience. It's long, has several supporting storylines, and would be impossible to summarize here.
The greatly simplified version is that every adult in Phillip Bell's life failed him. To a person, including his mother, they were putting a kid in the position of being family breadwinner, beginning when he was 14 or 15 years old. The money he brought in (both legitimate endorsements and pure pay-for-play -- which is against California HS rules) was used to fund a lavish lifestyle for the adults including drugs, alcohol and incessant partying.
In addition to being a 4-star talent at WR, Bell is apparently a bright kid and was making good grades until his family relocated from the San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles, where the home life caused him to go to Fs. How he got into tOSU isn't addressed. But given that academic performance, it might be an interesting side story.
There's no way that Bell's coaches didn't know about all this. But they had their own agendas, needing Bell's talents on the football field.
Today, Bell's mother is dead due to a combination of diabetes and acute cocaine toxicity, and he is estranged from his entire family -- father's side, mother's side, all grandparents, uncles, aunts, and half-siblings. From what I can infer, his "family" is his agent, along with a friend of his deceased mother -- whose motivations strike me as suspect.
It's a newspaper article, so I'm confident that the extent of the exploitation is an outlier and makes for a gripping story. I'm also confident that it's common as dirt in only slightly lesser degrees.
Here's a link to the article. It is long, but worth the reading time.
If you don't have a subscription, it'll be behind a paywall. But there are still hard copies available out there, and this article alone would make the single-issue price money well spent.
The status quo is unsustainable. A union / management / CBA structure might help college football, but I'm not sure how or whether that could address HS-level garbage like this in a manner that would stand up in court.
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