re: Didn't know bama's troubled past...

My understanding of the 2007 Book Troubles was that the school supply/book store had a very ill-suited system for handling the athletic scholarship book vouchers. In Fall 2005 one player figured out he could just get as many books as he wanted because the voucher had no way track back on the classes the player was enrolled in for the semester. He spreads this exploit to some of his friends and eventually a dozen or more students were running the grift. They’d essentially rent or lend out books to people on their voucher. Eventually one of the players took the grift too far and it caused someone in the supply store to go red alert and audit the voucher program.

Considering this started under Shula, I doubt this was an intentional scheme. Dude was too lazy to go through the trouble of having the SUPE store run a scheme for the players. It was ultimately an information systems failure that college kids figured out how to game.