Excuse the capital letters, but sometimes major emphasis is required. This is one such moment. Some football coaches pay recruits. Georgia’s football coach dips into his personal finances to reward the guys who’ve worked for him. He committed a violation, all right. He showed the rest of us what it means to put (literal) money where your mouth is.
For pete’s sake, the guy makes over $3 million a year, from a state and taxpayer-supported public university. That’s money taken from you and me, so the guy can arrange childrens’ games for grown adults. That’s money that could be spent on physical therapy for war veterans, or that you could keep to avoid foreclosure, but goes instead to undermining the value of an education as the hallmark of the modern university.
The money comes out of the athletic budget which comes from football ticket and related sales. He receives no taxpayer money. Whatever you think about the big business of football, football carries all of the other sports programs.