The Chris Martin Story Unfolds

According Martin in a story done by Mark Wheeler on rivals.com Martin had always wanted to be a gator.

some quotes from the interview

""When I made my choice, I don't think it was anything that put Cal over the top," said Martin. "Cal is a wonderful institution and coach [Jeff] Tedford runs a great program, but it was more that I got scared when that little episode happened with coach [Urban] Meyer and then coach [Charlie] Strong left for another program. I was really scared of what was going on at Florida."

"It was a situation where I didn't want to sit there and keep lying to myself," explained Martin. "I didn't want to be where my heart wasn't into it. It wouldn't have been fair to the coaches or the other players. If my heart isn't in it, I'm not going to work hard, I'm not going to have the drive I need. It wouldn't be the right thing to do.

My take on this is that Martin should not have signed until he was sure of where he wanted to go. This move was selfish and ended up putting Cal in a hole and prevented us from getting other recruits that may have otherwise been interested that played the same position as Martin. Martin may not have had the intention of hurting the Cal program in any way, but he did and his actions were damaging. Another reason why Cal fans have reason to be irritated is that Martin lied in his original press release citing outside influences to be the reason why he was transferring, inferring that he was scared of his Oakland roots and people still connected to him, good and bad, when the real reason Martin wanted to leave was his own personal desire to put on a gator uniform. Please dont blame the area or your roots when it is actually because of your personal desire to play elsewhere. It shows little class by Martin and honestly probably angered a lot of people in the Oakland area by saying that he is leaving because of them and then turn around and say that he has always had the desire to put on a gator uniform. As i said yesterday in my post i deleted, this is classless, selfish behavior and honestly for Cal this is a good riddance.