Clearly, Miss. State is dealing with what Alabama has to deal with every year, just not as well. Remember though, recruiting is kind of tossing a line in the water and hoping a fish bites. If you have say 50 lines in the water, but your limit is 25, well you can have a problem. However, if you don't put 50 lines in the water, you might end up only catching 20 fish. I suppose the main problem here is new levels of enthusiasm for Miss. State.2. Prior to this, State had 31 commits. Dan Mullen accepted 31 commitments with NSD 3 months away. He can control who commits to MSU. Saban gives some players the green light while others have to wait. Mullen can do the same.
This is a one way thing. A kid can do what they want, the program can't. Yes, they can "pull an offer", but they are going to get demolished in the media (like we are seeing now). Now, as you stated, you can have this semi-offer situation, in which the kid can or can't commit, but you also have any number of unconditional offers out there. It's very, very complicated and made more so by the silly rules. For instance, in this scenario a lot of it comes down to what class he could have counted for, and it would seem the issue is they were not going to be able to back-count him, and if so that's all SEC signing limit nonsense and nothing else.
I'm not going to defend everything a coach does, but the rules are almost entirely slanted against the coach. For instance, the financial aid agreements. The player can sign all of those he wants! That's ridiculous, but a kid can go around signing them left or right, while the school has to honor them. Until they put rules in place which hold both the player and the team to an equal level of responsibility, I won't tend to get up in arms about this sort of stuff. The one situation that did really sound messed up, was when a kid showed up to LSU to enroll and was told his scholarship had been pulled. Now that was messed up on the part of Les...