Without the conservatorship, Oher is ineligible to play basically.
Ineligible to play at Ole Miss, you mean. Because of the myriad recruiting violations committed by Ole Miss, particularly in the Oher recruitment? I think you're on to something.
Ole Miss would have been penalized and investigated, and the mega-booster called out publicly. But there is no written
policy that
the player is ineligible to play elsewhere? Otherwise, Washington would have been ineligible to play at Georgia last year, to cite only one example.
But where is
the rule that says a conservatorship -- normally invoked only in the cases of extreme mental disability -- cancels previous recruiting violations, and also the rule that adoption does not? After all, both are forward-looking legal instruments. The Tuohys did not retroactively become his conservator.
Or was it
backstage secretly negotiated with the NCAA by the multi-centi-millionaires, but there was no rule that permitted such a thing? Was it a secretly negotiated exception to the rules that
did exist?
I suspect you're right that it helped the Tuohys get the kid to Ole Miss immensely. And to get out of trouble.
But it didn't help Oher. He would not have been ineligible to play anywhere else. And if Oher had not been
lied to by the Tuohys and the apparently dishonest attorney that the Tuohys procured for Oher, stating that a conservatorship was simply the equivalent of adoption for adults, but instead it had been plain that the Tuohys would rather that Oher play at the school where they were mega-boosters than that the Tuohys adopt him at part of their family, I doubt Oher would have wanted to go to Ole Miss, anyway. He would have experienced it as
the ultimate betrayal and seen all the Tuohys' previous talk about "family" as a lie. And that talk about "family" and "love" and "adoption" was the basis of so many of the Tuohys' post-recruitment money-making deals, in which they had no obligation to represent Oher's interest in
before the conservatorship, but a
legally binding obligation to represent Oher's interests in as soon as they made the conservatorship. But they did not. They represented their family's interests, which they had manipulated for their gain to exclude Oher.
Oher would have been developed better elsewhere. And without all the negative stereotypes about him made into memorial book and movie moments. He had nothing to lose in going elsewhere and much to gain. But in making themselves his conservators, the Tuohys were legally bound to act in Oher's interests (not their own). They broke the law by not doing so.
I think you're on to something!