OMlawdog said:
As long as no one takes themselves too seriously.
I thought this had the possibility of being a black eye for Ole Miss, but it looks like we may come out looking ok.
I still say that no matter what anyone on here says, that even if you could guarantee that the player would be a first round OT for MSU, that no one actually adopts a 300 lb black 16 year old kid from Memphis, just so he can play football for MSU. Sure sounds funny, but actually doing it, is another story.
All that being said, I actually spoke to someone who knows something about MSU football this morning, and everything you are heaing about Tyler Russell is true. He is that good, and he will be starting before the end of the season, and if the OL can just be average, he will be the best MSU QB in a long time.</p>
Oher was brought into Briarcrest after the HEAD FOOTBALL COACH BEGGED the school president to let him in.
Within his first month or so there, Oher 'wandered' onto the FOOTBALL FIELD and picked up a heavy tackling dummy and took off with it, astounding the coaches. The head coach then had assistant coaches weigh him, and he was too big for their scales, so the team doctor took him into town to get him weighed.
.....Oher had still not met the Tuohy's yet....
According to the book, that Thanksgiving, Mrs. Tuohy saw him standing on a street corner in the snow and took him to buy him some clothes. Farmer's Almanac archive confirms there was no snow in Memphis during that week/weekend, so that was a lie. Apparently the trailer has him walking out in the middle of nowhere when Mrs. Tuohy pulled up in her car, so that's film exaggeration. The trailer also makes it seem like the Tuohys took him in then, but according to the book Oher did NOT stay with the Tuohys that Thanksgiving and won't be taken in permanently for another 19 months or so.
He continued at Briarcrest through the next spring and during the NEXT fall, he was still staying with at least five familes (including the Tuohys). He was by then playing basketball and showing obvious athletic ability. Still not yet "taken in" by the Tuohys.
The next spring, a YEAR AND A HALF after his arrival at Briarcrest, he goes out for spring training and immediately wows the Briarcrest coaches and Lemming the recruiting analyst, and coaches are flying in from all over the country to see Oher. Lemming even wrote that he could tell he was a blue chip prospect the first minute he saw him. LATER that spring, "after a track meet" (Briarcrest's track season runs from April through May), Mrs. Tuohy was taking Oher back to the trailer he was staying at, and when she saw the flattened air mattress, then took him home for good.
After he was taken in, he had 2-3 years of failing grades to overcome to become eligible. Thus the "Great Mormon Grade Grab", and Oher was able to replace each failed semester class with just hours of work on a BYU online class and a tutor helping him. And he did it over and over and over for 2-3 years of failed classes. Sean Tuohy was actually laughing at how easy they were able to get away with cheating the system.
Later Oher commits and signs with UM, but even after Oher enrolls at UM the NCAA is still suspicious and is still investigating the relationship between Tuohy and Oher. Soon after, while the NCAA is still investigating Oher's recruitment, the book "The Blind Side" comes out. The author is a well known write of sports books, so it seems like a story written by an independent sports journalist. Except that the author and Sean Tuohy just happened to grow up together. Never could find any final ruling by the NCAA on Oher, so I guess the NCAA investigators were blind sided.
Even without living with the Tuohys Oher would never have been able afford the tutor and online classes to get eligible. UM did the same with fellow 5-star recruit Jerrell Powe--a "guardian" paid for prep school, private tutor, and multiple online classes, and for many others that were quoted as saying "Coach Orgeron has a plan to get me eligible". Yet those same years, MSU had a 4-star DT and a 4-star DE that didn't make it into State and are now out of football. If we had cheated the system like UM, we could have turned those boys' lives around, too.
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