Nevin Shaprio, the squirreliest looking booster in perhaps the history of college boosterdom, recently ratted hard on his alma mater, The University of Miami, by detailing the improper benefits he provided to over 70 members of the Hurricanes football team over the past several seasons. Shapiro, who is now in prison for orchestrating a nearly $1B ponzi scheme, apparently doesn't give much of a hoot who he outs, and is letting everything regarding his ilicit dealings with The U hang out there, dirty laundry-like, for the world to see.
[SIDE: It may speak well to Dickie Scruggs' character that he's doing nothing of the sort. An just a thought.]
Surely you've heard of this by now. You'd have to be a terribly boring person or amazingly unobservant not to have. What you may not have heard, however, is that Ole Miss head coach Houston Nutt spoke with Shapiro in 2006 while at Arkansas. I'd imagine that his hot seat and the then-newly vacant Miami job were the topic du jour, because I hardly doubt that they'd have anything else in common to discuss.
This, as you'd expect, has generated a bit of a stir, both across the river from us and down to the southeast of us, in a county far less fair than our dear Lafayette. Haters gonna hate, I suppose, but it's an interesting topic to ruminate over and discuss.
My response when learning of Nutt's contact with Shapiro: so what? It was a phone call. It'd be one thing if Shapiro paid for Nutt's abortion or bought him a few dozen dolphin-shaped jet skis, but nothing of the sort took place. He simply spoke with a money-man at a university which had a job opening during a time when he was clearly no longer welcomed at Arkansas. Aside from being a kinda-sorta neatish story, I don't see that there's anything more to it, and anyone trying to make more of this are simply trying to besmirch Nutt's name any more than is necessary.
What is your response? Does this say something about Houston Nutt's character? Does it say anything more than we already know about his and Jimmy Sexton's (frankly, brilliant) raise-inducing tactics? Does it both you all that much?