Alabama Football Recruiting: Oversigning Tactics Continue with Crimson Tide

Don't think for one minute that athletes owe these big programs anything when they verbally commit, because college recruitment is not a two-way street. 

Matt Hinton of Yahoo Sports reports on the latest casualty of a big-time program overloading their roster and making sure their needs are met before their promises are met. 

According to Hinton, Alabama head coach Nick Saban received a commitment from Justin Taylor of North Atlanta High School. There is nothing odd in that as this is the season for such promises to come flooding to Alabama. 

This one is different in that Alabama has reneged on their initial promise to bring Taylor in for the upcoming season. It seems his services are no longer needed due to the fact that the program gave his spot away. 

Such is the awkward time that has landed after the SEC demanded 'oversigning' come to a swift end. The conference wishes to do away with stockpiling talent. Hinton describes it as: 

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a 25-man cap on new additions in any given year. Finally, no more stockpiling of academic casualties bound for junior college. No more new arrivals signing letters of intent that lock them into a specific school, only to discover six months later that there's no room for them, after all.

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Where does that leave Taylor, an amateur athlete getting over an injury that left him a year out of football? It leaves him out of the Alabama mix he thought he was a part of when he verbally committed a year ago. 

Recent Notre Dame commitment and star quarterback Gunner Kiel was given a ton of flack for pulling out of his LSU commitment and leaving to Notre Dame. 

It's time now to realize the players have just as much power as the schools, but it comes prior to their commitment and lasts once they sign on the dotted line. 

Taylor put much of his hope on the longstanding idea that a verbal commitment was just as good as a legal document. As we see in the report, Taylor was given a tenuous agreement as his option to sign his youth to Alabama. From Hinton: 

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Saban offered a sort of non-binding contract instead: As Taylor explains it, '…he also said he would sign a piece of paper to show that they are keeping their word—they are going to sign it and they want me to sign it to make sure I know I still have my scholarship.'

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Taylor has since decided to move on to another school after much thought and deliberation. The more that he pondered his plight the more he began to stew. Alabama pretty much used him, then tossed him aside when they had a more bona fide player in tow. 

You can't fault the program that is forever under pressure to win the next title or sign the next great athlete. 

A professional ethos of running programs continues to blur the lines of proper ethics in amateur sports. So the next time you deride a player for balking on a commitment, consider the program would do the same exact thing if they needed to. 

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