Normally, I find EDSBS quite funny. Heck, there’s probably not a single college football blog I’ve enjoyed more over the last few years than Every Day Should Be Saturday. It’s hysterical, and it’s hysterical because the blog’s proprietor, Orson Swindel, is hysterical.

And that’s why Orson’s latest post sticks out like a sort thumb infected with gangrene and painted road-sign yellow.

Is Tom Lemming a Notre Dame Shill in 2008?

Lorenzo Booker thought so in 2004, certainly, and given some of the people we’ve talked to about it–yes, anonymous sources, but good ones that we didn’t just make up on a caffeine bender through the aisles of Inserection posting from our iPhone–the suspicion is there.

The number one complaint about Lemming involves his selection process for the Army All-American Game, a process he’s heavily involved in as “the country’s leading expert on college football recruiting and high school talent.” (There’s an R. Kelly joke here about “high school talent,” but that would be in error since the area of specialty in question for him is “middle school talent.” Moving on…)

A look at the rosters certainly does look statistically anomalous: of the 84 players invited to the Army All-American fully 21 of them either listed Notre Dame as their destination school or as an interested school. 14 are outright commits, and another 7 put Notre Dame on the short list.

Is this any different than what you would see in a selection of the young and athletically gifted from around the rest of the country? In this sample, the answer is yes: the same roster only features six USC commits, one LSU commit, one Florida commit, and eight commits for Ohio State, who must be the other school deserving of bids in Lemming’s eyes. Notre Dame does have the second-ranked recruiting class in the country, true, but Florida’s at number one, followed by ND, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida State, all of whom send relatively nobody to the Army All-American Game.

That’s 4, count ‘em, four, entire paragraphs with barely a single funny sentence. From EDSBS! On a day where Orson isn’t out-sourcing the posts to some guest-blogger! What the heck is going on there?

My guess: Orson’s starting to get a little sick of hearing about Florida’s own Urban Meyer, and his shady recruiting tactics, and thus the deflector shields have been given full power.

Let’s Review! (Working Backwards and in 5 minutes…)

• Salt Lake Tribune writes up story of Urban Meyer using the Florida Gymnastics program to recruit the girlfriend of JC receiver Carl Moore. After the story broke, Urban insisted, “we’re fine.” Reality insisted, “maybe not.“
• Urban Meyer vigorously recruits all-everything Corner Patrick Johnson, Johnson commits to some school not named Florida, Urban vigorously points out anomalous improvement in Johnson’s ACT scores.
• Urban takes the time out to direct a Florida Student Athlete, Tim Tebow, to talk to recruit Carl Moore (yes, the Carl Moore from the other story above) immediately after Tebow wins the Heisman, in what seems like a pretty obvious violation of NCAA rules.

And yeah, that’s just what I found in 5 minutes of googling “Urban Meyer.” Not “Urban Meyer Recruiting Violations” or “Urban Meyer is a Liar.” Just “Urban Meyer.” And that’s all using a trackpad on my laptop too, so just imagine how much I could have found in 5 minutes with a mouse! Imagine if I could link to all the premium info and “sources” that tell the story of Urban encouraging kids to lie to other programs about their commitments!

As to the content of Orson’s post: I don’t really care. I’m not offended by the idea that Lemming has a soft-spot for Notre Dame. Most recruiting analysts have soft-spots. That a national analyst would have a soft spot for the only true national program in college football probably shouldn’t surprise anyone if, indeed, that’s the case. Don’t even get me started about the homerism of SEC region recruiting analysts. People just don’t notice it much because they don’t have their own all star game or the national recognition. And besides, overall, Orson’s analysis of the notion isn’t unfair, though his conclusion seems like a bit of a leap (yeah, he uses real numbers, but he uses Rivals.com numbers which tend to swing wildly, to make his point).

Hopefully Urban Meyer can stop doing shady things in the recruiting world and then Orson can get the funny back and leave the dull, stark, mundane posting to Brian Cook.

Ah, and since this post is largely about Urb…

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