Congrats on your first post!...
If the standard for cheating is what U of L did with info furnished by Wake Forest, the answer to your question is "yes". In principle, there is no OK way for you to get info about your opponent that your opponent doesn't want you to have. There are simply more conventional ways to do it, like a coach or player transfers, vs. a less conventional way as happened with Wake. And any effort to distinguish those two is just rationalization by fans and talking heads.
The real issue is policing it... If you can't prevent a coach or player from transferring private info, you're going to have a hard time outlawing it. And no law, rule, or policy is well implemented that can't be enforced. The important takeaway is THAT becomes the standard by which all other potential transgressions should be judged. In other words, short of committing a crime to obtain it, obtaining the same info that a player or coach might communicate to an opponent is pretty much OK.
Thanks for the question, and looking forward to your second post!
LPT Football: More questions than answers...
Not my first post on Rivals, just on here. Anyway, just wanted to make sure you wouldn't hold UofL to a double-standard.
By the way, here's what Coach Clawson said on Mike & Mike this morning:
"When we arrived for our game against Louisville in early November, our equipment staff had found materials on our sideline the Friday when setting up the locker room," Clawson said. "You're not allowed to get there until a certain time, the assumption being they're going through their walkthrough. And our equipment people found cards laying right on our sideline and didn't think much of it.
"And the day of the game we got there about an hour before, and the equipment manager presented our offensive coordinator with the cards and said, 'I don't think this is any big deal,' just a lot of stuff that we do normally. And our coordinator flipped through it and there was very, very detailed information there. Formations that we had never run, alignments, even some of it was even some empty sets we had never run before, but some of it was even sets we had run but we had flipped personnel."
Clawson then went on to detail why the team had new things designed for the game, and how players felt about not running the plays they'd worked on in practice all week.
"Louisville is an excellent football team, and it was a game that we felt, in order to score points, we had to have some wrinkles in," Clawson said. "And all of those wrinkles were right in front of us. And at that point, we knew we had been compromised, and as a result, a lot of those things we had prepared, we couldn't run because we knew they had it.
"After the game our players were upset. They wanted to know why did we work on all these things and not use them. They felt we had not given them the best opportunity to win the game. So we had a team meeting and told them something was compromised, we're not sure how. At that point it triggered an investigation. We did not want that out. We did not want that leaked because that compromised our own investigation of trying to find out what had happened, and how it happened."
Now knowing this, how do you feel about Petrino pleading ignorance to this whole situation? Would you rather have him come out and admit it or say what he said when questioned? It's obvious that he had to know something if play cards were left on the WF sideline the day before the game. He wouldn't be that oblivious to what the defense had planned for the WF game. Anyway, I'm not going to get in a back and forth because it won't go anywhere plus I don't want a long explanation, but just want to know how you feel about Petrino saying he didn't know anything but when he in fact did know something.
