Once you start paying attention to what schools – high schools and universities – will do to win basketball and football games, you’re in for a treat. School officials will do anything, it turns out, to attract and retain tacklers and dribblers.

There’s the almost thirty year old recently arrived Sudanese gentleman who has been winning games like crazy for Catholic Central High School in Ontario. Everyone – the coach, the recruiters – is shocked right down to the ground that a 6’10” adult male isn’t fifteen, but twice that.

“At 6’10 he was pretty dominant, he was dunking on everybody, it was pretty hard,” said Fazar Yousif, 15, who attends Kennedy Collegiate high school.

Now, for us, for the States, he decided to tell the truth:

When he entered [Canada] his passport and visa application listed his birth date as November 1998. But when he applied for a U.S visitor visa in April, his fingerprints matched an individual who’d already applied for a [US] visa with a birth date in November 1986…

Closer to home, there’s Bellevue High School in Washington, where they just go ahead and break every goddamn rule in the book, baby!

The report focused on excessive payments to coaches from the Wolverines booster club that were never approved by the school board. Investigators say tax records show during a 10-year period, the club paid coaches more than $500,000, with the majority of that money going to the head coach.

Investigators also found players used false addresses, the district and coaches failed to monitor player addresses, and that the head coach directed and encouraged players to attend The Academic Institute — a small private for-profit school in Bellevue.

The report says coaches coordinated tuition payments for some athletes paid by the booster club or its members so they could attend the private school, where investigators claim some players were able to pass classes they failed in public schools.

I think it’s safe to say that for these lads the transition to university football will be a smooth – even unnoticeable – one. Steady as she goes!