I feel bad for the kid. This story will follow him through out time. Even if he goes to the NFL, he will be known as a Momma's boy. I for one would like my child to go to school out of state, and have to fend for themselves without Mom's and Dad's safety net.
He says he is still coming and will sign the letter tomorrow. It seems that his mom grabbed the LOI and took off. That is one way to keep your kid from signing with a school.
According to what I read...He is under 21 and per NCAA rules, he is required to have his guardian sign for him. That would be his mother. I think it is a silly rule. If he truely wants to go to Arkansas it should be up to him and not his mother. He will resent her for the rest of his life if she prevents him from attending the school he wants to go to.
If she wants to decide which school he attends she should come up with tuition money for him. She may have to get another job to afford that though...or maybe she needs to just get a job...I am not sure if she works or not.
She sounds like a real nutjob to me though. Probably why he wants to be miles away from her.
The NCAA is just looking for trouble with that rule. In almost any other situation, the law is that at 18 you are legally an adult and may sign a contract without neeeding a guardian to sign it. That is the law. However, too often the NCAA seems to think it is a law onto itself, and here is another example. They decide that they are not satisfied with the age of majority set forth by the law, so they set their own. so, now despite being legally an adult for any other agreement, this recruit cannot attend Arkansas without his mother's permission.
Remember that what college a student attends plays a big role in their long term career prospects, and also remember that the large majority of NCAA student-athletes will not end up playing professional sports and will have to live with whatever career impacts come with the choice of college that was made for them due to this rule. Not all colleges offer the same majors, and even if they do, not all colleges are regarded as equal for a given major. With this rule, the NCAA is allowing parents to make a decision for their otherwise legally adult offspring that will affect their futures long beyond the day they eventually graduate college. If the NCAA wants to claim to have any vestige of academics (which the claim they do and if you want to doubt that just ask UConn basketball), they need to change this rule. If these student-athletes cannot even decide for themselves where they are going to go to college (again, it affects their choice of career options well beyond graduation), any talk of placing value on academics in college athletics is little more than empty rhetoric.
