Good work by the Roanoke Times to get more info about the mysterious circumstances surrounding Ollie Weiss' abrupt resignation from Tech this spring. http://www.roanoke.com/sports/college/wb/216536 Turns out Ollie was a little dirty. Not a huge surprise but still never a good thing for a non-revenue program to have come to light.
Seven of eight were from the 2008 team that went winless in ACC play? Oliver, you got ripped off buddy.
Tech trying to put a positive spin(and lessen the NCAA penalties) by saying they gained no competitive advantage since nobody else was recruiting the players. I would suggest that's not correct as I suspect without the payments the players may not have come to Virginia Tech at all. I wonder if there were any players he paid the fee's for who weren't cleared by the NCAA or were not accepted by VT
Poor judge of talent or bait and switch by their club coaches? Bought the Yugo instead of the Mercedes
Well, we should keep in mind the actual size of the payments: Having a coach cover a $400 fee might be a nice inducement to come to VT (although even that's a bit of a stretch), but a $70 or $150 fee? Not only that, the article claims that all the players later repaid Weiss. I think it's pretty unlikely that temporarily loaning a foreign player $115 gives you a major recruiting advantage. Violations are violations, and Weiss was right to step down - but let's not exaggerate the actual scope or impact of the misconduct here.
The NCAA is just crap. Weiss was a good coach and man. Tough on his players, but got more out of them than they believed they could. It would be so much better if college soccer moved to the model used by the BYU club team. BTW, Weiss is now back in Raleigh coaching a premier CASL team.
At least that's all he got caught paying in the US, where the receipts could be tracked. Makes one wonder what the fee for Patrick Nyarko was.
Is this the same Patrick Nyarko you were so sure was going to be a crap professional? Yep, I remember those claims. Nice work on that one.
Yes. The guy the Fire bent over backward to give starting time to last year, to get into the Ghanian National Team side, and who wasn't getting anything done, and they had to move to the substitute's bench, and who's scored 5 goals in 1800 minutes of play. That guy. I was wondering what the fee for that guy was.
I would have to agree with you on this one; he's a hard worker, has plenty of pace; his first touch is terrible, and sorry, strikers aren't guys who score 4 goals a year. I certainly wish him the best, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for the epiphany of his play. The fact that he has an idiot for a head coach, with an assistant whom communicates telepathically, doesn't help his situation, though. I was wondering what the fee was, also.
I'll just have to disagree with all of you and would point out that Weiss paid university fees for the students--these would be the same no matter who the player and where they were from. He got them all back as well. Against NCAA rules, deserved to be fired, agreed. Oliver also left a mess of a program for the next coach that is going to take a few years to undo. But he didn't get player kickback money as both of you seem to be suggesting. Let's keep this in perspective.
And to be honest, I was kidding about the fee. I would just say that compared to what happens in football and basketball, this was pretty chicken-shit stuff; illegal?, I suppose on the letter of the law, but c-s nonetheless.
Unlike oldguy, I'm not kidding about the fees. And I'm not suggesting that he got any player kickback money. I am suggesting that players coming from places like Ghana, with dodgy birth certificates, no particularly credible paper trail describing their prior competitive background, and no tangible assets otherwise, likely require more than tuition, room, board, and books to wind-up at a school in the middle of the mountains in western Virginia. Inasmuch as their next door neighbor at WVU was canned a couple of seasons ago for recruiting an Australian kid straight out of the SPL, and Jacksonville's program was killed in 2000 over a couple of professional Bulgarian recruits, I'm willing to believe anything. I think the university fees were what could be reasonably traced. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.