Readers of this blog may have noticed, in the past few months, growing disgust with the operations of college football in general, the media coverage of sports, and of the public consumption of that somewhat seamy coverage. Leave it to the bloody-minded world to crystallize all these concerns into one fine, gleaming point.

We’re talking, of course, about Demar Dorsey – the erstwhile juvenile delinquent-turned supposedly reformed football star that Michigan inked in a last minute change of heart on signing day. Namely – Michigan has decided not to accept his admission. Before we continue, please don’t confuse this with an argument that Michigan should be in the business of accepting marginal academic qualifiers who had admitted taking part in breaking & entering and armed robbery (though Dorsey’s record is clean, he has verbally admitted his participation in media interviews).

The simple fact is this: on Signing Day, Michigan presumably knew what the state of Dorsey’s academic qualifications were. They knew about his spotted criminal past. Neither of these items deterred the school from offering him a scholarship and accepting his binding Letter of Intent. In other words – it allowed Dorsey to make a commitment to them – one he couldn’t revoke until THEY allowed him to.

Vetting commits’ admissions profiles prior to allowing them to sign is not completely unheard of. Stanford endured some turnover in the ranks of their class as admissions weighed in on various athlete’s chances for admission. As the US Today notes:

 It was an odd recruiting season for Stanford. The Cardinal had 24 verbal commitments by October, suggesting Stanford might have the best recruiting class in the Pac-10, and then added nine more commitments between then and signing day. But on Feb. 3, it signed just 22 players, leaving it ranked about in the middle of Pac-10 recruiting classes. The Cardinal did collect a group of pretty good linebackers, which was the team’s highest priority, but the final signed class did not quite live up to the promise of the fall. Much of the apparent slippage had to do with Jim Harbaugh’s recruiting method. He offered players scholarships long before they were admitted to Stanford, targeting players who looked as if they could make the grade, then outlined exactly what they had to do to meet admission standards. Some commitments dropped out either because they failed to gain admission or did not want to risk a possible rejection.

So there you have it. Stanford, which maintains it’s own minimum admissions qualifications above those of the NCAA managed to purge eleven players from it’s recruiting class before signing day by being up front with their recruits about what academic performance they needed prior to accepting their LOI’s. The recruits in questions either couldn’t, or didn’t want to meet those requirements and went elsewhere. No harm, no foul. Stanford, it should be said, is admitting and enrolling every single player that signed a LOI.

Not so with Dorsey. As Brian at MGoBlog notes:

The proverbial reliable sources have reported that Rodriguez is recruiting with an eye towards NCAA minimums that most programs claim to be above until push comes to shove, while admissions is looking at a larger-than-usual number of players near the borderline and having a little freakout. We’ve finally gotten some clarification on exactly how Michigan hamstrings itself in recruiting: they’ll take kids who scrape by the NCAA minimums (hello Marques Slocum) but only so many.So here we are, with a kid who said he’d come to Michigan having held up his end of the bargain only to get stiffarmed by some bureaucrats hell-bent on being a hooker who won’t do that.

Michigan, at the time they offered him, was aware of his GPA, his ACT, his past, and the fact that he was attending an “alternative High School” called LifeSkills. None of these facts deterred them from offering a LOI at the time, and not one of these facts has changed since. Yet, somehow – Dorsey seems likely to be left in the wind. Why?

The options range from “incompetence” to “they’re a bunch of weak-willed cowards”. It’s entirely possible that LifeSkills is a destination for kids to get a few easy A’s to grease their way into a division one scholarship – similar to how Michael Oher used BYU correspondence classes to qualify. However, isn’t that a determination that U of M could have made before they sent the LOI? If LifeSkills is an unacceptable school, they easily could have known that in February. It’s also entirely reasonable to suggest that a kid with Dorsey’s past and academic performance doesn’t belong at Michigan. You can argue that Michigan can admit some fringe kids (as Brian notes), but not “too many”. But again – isnt’ that easily figured out before signing day? It’s possible that the same organization incompetence that sunk the program in NCAA violations also shamefully burned Dorsey.

The other possibility, clearly, is that they’re simply cowards. The signing of Dorsey kicked off typically outraged columns from Drew Sharp, an expose from the Free Press, a badgering from Dave Birkett, hostile jokes from radio hosts, and crude jokes across the blogosphere that would justify every critique Buzz Bissenger leveled at the medium. After suffering a continued PR hit from the NCAA allegations, the school could have simply decided Dorsey wasn’t worth the press. As an alumnus, this is the most disturbing possibility. The school should, at it’s heart, have the best interest of students and even prospective students as a priority – they shouldn’t be ballast to be thrown overboard the moment the AD realizes the program is taking on water. Frankly, it’s something that, as a fan and alumnus, makes me ashamed of the school.

And a word about the media reaction to Dorsey. In the past few months, Dorsey has been sports-radio fodder, “exposed” on the front page of the Free Press, chronicled on ESPN.com, and the subject of countless “teases” on the front pages of recruiting industry website like Rivals and Scout. Dorsey attracts page hits – a quick scan of MGoBlog’s message board shows four Demar Dorsey subject threads with over 100 comments. Demar Dorsey has been good business for everyone, it seems, other than Demar Dorsey.

About that – can someone remind me why, again, thousands of adults are intimately aware of the GPA, ACT, criminal record, and high school transcript of a 17-year old we never met? How do I know any of the shit I just wrote? Until these kids step on campus, can’t they be left alone? That wouldn’t have helped Dorsey get into Michigan, but it would have stopped him from becoming the subject of a media campaign against him. We aren’t naive enough to suggest that all interest in recruiting means you’re a “stalker”, but it does create a slippery slope – one where the private life and confidential records of high school students become public record, and  allegations needlessly flung.

In the case of Dorsey, maybe we will, and maybe we won’t find out what “the problem” was. Maybe the press will violate his privacy further and get an answer for us. At the very least, gossip-mongering moderators on “premium” boards will undoubtedly obliquely suggest what happened, and sell it to people who have become addicted to knowing everything there is to know about teenagers. Of course, there will be no back-up, and no sourcing – just fantastical ramblings culminating at the least in heresy, and at worst in libel. Wasn’t this shit more fun when you didn’t know who a player was until he stepped on the field?

In the end, Demar Dorsey was failed by everyone. He was failed by the recruiting services who stoked the rumors of his qualification saga, by the main-stream media for portraying him as a thug to a national audience, by blogs and talk radio for portraying him as a villian, and most of all, by Michigan who turned their backs on a commitment they made to a teenager. For all of these dealings with “adults”, Dorsey received precisely nothing and remains exactly where he was.