Army Assistant Coach Fined $25,000 for role in #Wakeyleaks

Yesterday FootballScoop.com broke the news that Army West Point Defensive Coordinator Jay Bateman accepted stolen intel from Wake Forest radio analyst Tommy Elrod on Demon Deacon football. Per Zach Barnett at Football Scoop...

As a coach, I look to the service academies for being the beacon of morality in the business. Maybe that’s naive, but their admission rates, discipline and all that comes with being at West Point, Annapolis or the Air Force Academy leads to some high expectations, and it seems as if the Army West Point AD agrees:

I think this is cause for some NCAA rules to be set in stone on this topic this summer, but also drives the difference between morality and legality.

There are a lot of de facto rules in college athletics (recruiting has many) and the gut feeling on this is obviously that it was uncouth if not immoral.

As a high school coach there are many opportunities to gain access to an opponents materials via Hudl, transferring students, or coaches that move on and bring playbooks and hand signals with them. As a coach you have to walk a fine line between gamesmanship and cheating. Everyone remembers that Brady Bunch where Greg’s playbook is stolen by some dude with nice hair.

There is no fine line with actual material from current gameplans though, it’s a bold statement of cheating, much like it was with Marcia’s boyfriend.

The final “awe shucks” moment here is that with coaches acting unethical a majority of the time nowadays no one is surprised, but every athletic department sends out a memo of where they stand and Army has sent out a message of their own.