You probably know the saying "You can't keep a good man down." Well, apparently it applies to evil men as well.

In the increasingly paranoid and do-anything-to-win world of college football, Alabama coach Nick Saban has found a way to not just bend the rules, but totally slip past their original intended purposes.

There's a new NCAA rule that doesn't allow college head football coaches to visit high schools during the spring evaluation period. It's shockingly known as The Saban Rule because of the substantial number of high schools that Saban was known to frequent. He may have even violated his own rule by speaking extensively with three south Florida recruits last spring. But now Saban's basically doing the same thing, and legally too.

How? Web-cams of course.

A Crimson Tide assistant visited top recruit William Ming in Athens, Georgia at his high school, which has a Distance Learning Lab that allows students to take online classes by using a live Web-cam. The assistant gave Ming a Web address that Ming was able to log on to later in the day. He spent 15-20 minutes talking to Saban through a web-cam.

Because this isn't considered face-to-face contact, and fits the guidelines of a phone call under NCAA rules, it's totally legal. But slimy. Very, very slimy. So in other words, I'd expect to see a lot of coaches using this pretty soon.

The worst thing about big-time college football recruiting is how closely it resembles the problem of performance enhancing drugs in sports. Both are continual attempts to beat the system and get every edge that you possibly can. And I'm not just talking about this web-cam deal in regards to recruiting, I'm talking about paying guys under the table and other much worse things.

But as long as colleges and sports are intertwined here in the states, we'll continue to have coaches who say they're recruiting "student athletes" when that's anything but the case.

I've always been a proponent of the European system, which is that sports and school are two separate entities. No need to worry about grade point averages, recruiting violations, or backroom booster shenanigans. It also helps that you actually get paid as a professional athlete at every level in Europe.

But that won't happen here in the states, and I know it. So I guess I'll just watch as college football continually degenerates into what it already is - a free minor league for the NFL.


[Thanks to The Wizard Odds for finding the Saban article]