This. If this is how James intended to operate, he should have said so up front instead of call up the coaches and begging to "commit" without even visiting. Coaches either would've said "that's cool" or "let us know when you're ready to shut things down and we'll take your commitment."
Simply put, if James had been up front he wouldn't be a part of this class. Corey Clement would. So I don't understand people going out of their way to defend "it's his right to do XYZ"... of course it's his "right"... that doesn't make it an OK decision taking the perspective of ND. In fact, it shows a total disregard for anyone but himself. It is, at best, a selfish move... and that can be tolerated in some cases. At worst, he's been completely disingenuous from the moment he realized he didn't have commitable scholarships to Arkansas and Florida State and scrambled to find the next top tier school that would take him. You should not be able to make a "reservation" in case you blow your knee out. That's effectively what he did. This doesn't come up at schools like USC or Alabama because they'll just say "sorry" in early February and not let you sign. Because we don't operate that way, we can't afford to let kids operate the way James is right now. Which is why the staff has adopted the "looking if you're looking" approach and continues to recruit kids even when positions are filled.
Off topic but I hate this excuse for "kids" more than anything. I remember pretty well what I was like at 18 considering that it wasn't that long ago. At 18 you know what's right, and you know what's wrong and you know that your actions affect others and that there are consequences for everything that you do.
Off topic from Jamel, but I've hated this excuse since I started following recruiting at 18. If a kid acts like a *** throughout the process, it might not be that he's 18. It might just be that he's a ***.
I see what you guys are saying, and I tend to agree, looking at it in a vacuum, that Jamel shouldn't have committed if he wasn't ready to commit, but every year kids are going to do that because they are kids and don't have the maturity to think long term, etc. That doesn't make it right, and it doesn't mean all kids don't have that kind of maturity; like Greyhammer is saying, many of us probably were at least mature enough to understand how our actions affect other people when we were 18. James has failed to do that if he thinks its unfair that we won't let him take visits without jeopardizing his spot.
But I also tend to agree with Wooly that it makes no sense to get angry about it -- though maybe I have a different rationale. As I think Fbolt said, this is going to happen EVERY YEAR. It is a GIVEN with kids that age. There will always be some who don't have the maturity to determine what they really want in a college once and for all, as they are still growing, changing, maturing people, so they'll change their mind, want to revisit the decision, etc. So I don't see any point in wasting energy getting huffy about it, and I wish people wouldn't.
(By the way, go back and look at some of Jamel James's quotes from when he committed if you think that he wasn't all ND at the time. He said he was completely done with the process, he's thrilled to have found a second home, etc. Unless you think he is a bald-faced liar, I think you have to accept that he wasn't playing us from the start; he really thought ND was the place for him when he committed, even if he is having second thoughts now.)
All you can do is do what BK is doing: educate the kid, explain to him that we've been counting him in, other people want his spot and have moved on because we've told them that he is coming to ND, and if he isn't sure he's coming to ND then we may decide to offer his spot to someone else. There is no reason for moral outrage ... like so much of what BK and the staff do, it's an opportunity to teach a kid a lesson and help him grow up.
So to the extent that all Wooly is saying is that the moral outrage is misplaced, I totally agree. Save that stuff for the politics threads. It's not that anyone is wrong that James is wrong; it's that getting worked up about it is like getting worked up about turf toe. With young athletes, it's just going to happen sometimes.
