Is There An Alabama Scandal On The Horizon?

This past week a glowing story by Yahoo! Sports (I absolutely hate typing the exclamation point when referencing Yahoo) made the University of Miami look like the most corrupt football program in the country since SMU went full retard in the mid 80’s and got themselves a good ‘ol death penalty from the NCAA.

If you don’t want to read the whole article (and I assure you, you do), I’ll summarize: Basically all of Miami’s coaching staff participated in a bunch of bad stuff with formerly wealthy booster (and current Ponzi scheme convict) Nevin Shapiro, including providing cash payments, free boat rides, and whores to prospective players. Mr. Shapiro is currently serving an extended sentence in Federal Prison for running the Ponzi scheme that gave him the money to buy hookers for football players, and has decided that ratting out Miami is the only sensible thing to do.

So how does this involve Alabama, you might ask? It turns out that after Randy Shannon was fired as Miami’s coach, his staff decided to find other Universities where they can put their battle hardened hooker delivery skills to use. Two of the coaches specifically named in the report, Jeff Stoutland and Joe Pannunzio, found new jobs at the University of Alabama. Stoutland is the new offensive line coach with a two year contract at $395k, while Pannunzio is the new Director of Football Operations.

If you listen to Paul Finebaum’s daily radio show (which is much like a train wreck in slow motion: You want to look away, but it is so awesome that you can’t), you will have heard a significant hubbub about the hiring of these two former Miami coaches, and how Nick Saban has some “questions that need to be answered”. Radio shows and news outlets alike are having a blast speculating about this link between Alabama and the Miami scandal.

As much as I love a good scandal, and I really do, this is a whole lot of nothing that folks are getting themselves worked up over. There are two basic explanations for the hiring of both Stoutland and Pannunzio:
1. Both men were asked at some point in the hiring process if they had any sort of improprieties in their past, and they both lied.
2. Alabama hired both men with at least some knowledge that they had committed pretty severe NCAA violations while coaching at Miami.

Seeing how well Nick Saban appears to run the Alabama program, which of these two situations seems most likely? I’ll give you a hint. Use the principle of Occam’s Razor, which is basically that the simplest answer is usually also the correct one.

The worst thing that Alabama is dealing with is that the University was lied to during the hiring process, which should make it pretty easy to dismiss both guys if that is the case. To subscribe to the other theory is to believe that Alabama knowingly hired not one, but two ticking time bombs on their staff. This is stupid for so many reasons, not the least of which is that Alabama already totally has a guy on staff who delivers the players to hookers paid for by boosters*, and he’s doing a fantastic job.

*Allegedly. And by “allegedly”, I mean I made this up entirely, but it’s probably true.