Miami fans: Your ‘Nevin Shapiro: Stop Snitchin’ shirts have arrived
The first stage of grief following a traumatic experience: Denial, which was in no short supply last week after ex-Miami booster turned convicted Ponzi-schemer Nevin Shapiro detailed nearly a decade's worth of NCAA violations implicating dozens of Hurricane players and coaches. The second stage: Anger. So maybe the existence of a "Nevin Shapiro: Snitches Get Stitches" T-shirt on leading 'Canes sites is actually a sign of progress:
Fresh from our guys at Bad Boys Of The 80s, the "Snitches Tee" - for that snitching, stool pigeon, scumbag, jailbird rat, Nevin Shapiro. Rakontur's Billy Corben [director of the "30 For 30" documentary "The U" — ed.] turned us on to the new tee, so we made a point to get it in stock due to popular demand. This worn-in, comfy tee is a double middle finger to the corrupt NCAA and that steaming pile of human garbage rotting in an Atlanta prison. This tee might not be for everybody, but there was a big outcry for it and to those who see it as therapy, here you go. Go Canes. U Family. Keep the faith.
Online apparel shops calling out white-collar con men on behalf of a private university may not be exactly what Rodney Bethea and Skinny Suge had in mind, but they'd appreciate the sentiment, I'm sure.
In the meantime, our picture of Nevin Shapiro's megalomaniacal web of deceit continues to expand — most recently to Arkansas, where his name has surfaced, incredibly, in the mountain of phone records and other documents solicited by a single Razorback fan through the Freedom of Information Act in early 2007. At the time, the fan was looking for dirt on then-head coach Houston Nutt, and actually succeeded in spoiling the relationship between coach and university to the extent that Nutt bolted the following winter for Ole Miss. But oh, it could have been so, so much dirtier:{YSP:MORE}
An example of Shapiro being involved in a manner he had no business being: He spoke to then-Arkansas coach Houston Nutt on a couple of occasions in December 2006 about the UM coaching job after [former Miami coach] Larry Coker left.
According to Nutt's cell phone records obtained by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette through the Freedom of Information Act, Nutt spoke with Shapiro, in addition to UM assistant AD Tony Hernandez.
According to records, Nutt called Shapiro at 10:17 a.m. on Dec. 7, 2006 and the call lasted 30 minutes. Nutt then hung up and called his agent, Jimmy Sexton, before contacting Shapiro again that same day. Nutt also called Hernandez four times in a span of four hours that day.
Nevin Shapiro's presence in LAS CRONICAS DE BOSS HOG is a Fabergé egg of corruption and insanity: At one point, the man behind the most infamous college football scandal of the last decade managed to insert himself, unsolicited, directly into the dumbest college football scandal of the last decade. And if it turns out Shapiro's call to Nutt wasn't unsolicited — if anyone in an official capacity at Miami put him up to it or was even aware of it — then that's one less chip on the U's side of the table when it gets to the bargaining phase.
- - -
Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
