Coach Dennis Franchione clarified the comments made by an A&M recruit last week mentioning "keeping pockets full" and "being taken care of" by the university. Franchione, or someone identifying themselves as "Coach Fran," anyway, took the bandwidth to address these concerns on CoachFran.com on Friday. EDSBS and its stellar cast of sources, as we've done in the past, worked hard to ferret out the original drafts of the post, which appear in their edited form below.
Coach Fran has a letter for you. We've got the rough draft.
From the phone calls of sportswriters and some emails sent by concerned Aggies, I guess one of ourformer signees created a little stir yesterday with his comments in his hometown newspaper. You can relax. No rules are being broken.as far as you know.
Terrence McCoy, whose brother Jamie was is a redshirt freshman quarterback on our team, told a dead man walking sportswriter in Midland about how well we take care of our football players at A&M, and he mentioned money and meals. Sometimes, people talk when they shouldn't. And that's how some people learn lessons in life. Those lessons come at a cost, which sometimes includes kneecaps.
To explain in detail what a football scholarship provides for a student-athlete would take more time and space than either you or I have. Frankly, I doubt you could grasp the numbers. The meal plan alone costs hundreds--hundreds!--of dollars. But basically, they receive tuition, fees, books, room and meals. In addition, under certain specified conditions they are entitled to meal stipends such as when the place they eat on their meal plan isnt open, usually a modestly priced restaurant tab plus unlimited alcohol, which comes to around $200 a meal - or sometimes meal per diems when were traveling in our gold leaf painted, hot-tub equipped Aggie Land Cruiser with the twenty-sixes spinning. It ought to be a crime to be this hood! That kind of rhyme dropping keeps the street cred flowing like water, wodi.
All anyone needs to know is that our director of football operations, Charley North, works very closely with both compliance, also known as Luther the Switch and Ramon "El Matador" Martinez, and our business office on managing exactly what a player is to receive. It is monitored and audited to the dime., which is one tenth of a dollar, which is where I think the math will get tricky for you. It's okay, math's hard! Let Coach Fran count it for you. There are all kinds of checks and balances and procedures to make sure there is no detectable abuse of the system.
Terrence made an foolish, fatal innocent remark he will pay for in the sweet blood of his unwitting kin , yet he is right we not only take very good care of our football players, we take pride in doing so. We make sure they receive everything that NCAA rules allow. We also give them gold ingots covered in chocolate every day following a big game. Just kidding! There's no chocolate involved whatsoever, Myles Brand. That would be against the rules, which I know more about than any human being alive. There are even rules these days that prevent us from killing them for their impudence, which is why Reggie McNeil still draws breath after rolling his eyes at my brilliant playcalling shorting them. In the old days, there was a popular phrase "Pulling a Fulmer" break their plate when coaches could take away a players meal as a consequence for disciplinary action and eat it themselves. ; that practice went away quite a while back. We just make them mule stanazolol across state lines in their own cars. No rule against that, Myles Brand!
Rest assured that everybody who works on the books for our program is a person of unquestionable ethics and integrity. And we all know the Aggie Code of Honor no cheating, and no tolerance for those who do. Janet, would you check my email again? That Georgia Tech gig would be sweet, and they'll be impressed by my penchant for irrational two-point conversion attempts and swinging gate punt formations. Wows 'em every time! And get the oil in the Escalade changed--keeping it constantly running all day and night has put a hell of strain on the engine.
ADDENDUM: Who knew they advertised Aggie coaching positions on Monster? Clone sites, like bad Photoshop, are pure Internet sunshine.