FSU, they’re just not that into you.

If you’re wondering how FSU, which supposedly looked for a way out of the ACC for a while, signed on to that shiny new grant of media rights, remember that it always takes two to tango:

Since that time, Barron and FSU officials apparently have done just that, including exploring the possibility of joining the likes of Florida, Alabama and LSU in the SEC.

While it’s difficult to confirm how far those talks advanced, FSU officials came away with the understanding that the SEC saw little financial incentive to adding the Seminoles. Bringing on FSU would neither expand television markets nor open recruiting territories.

Just because you’re willing to go to bed with somebody doesn’t mean your partner will accept.  At least not if he or she is sober.  Or, if you prefer it stated in more commercial terms, you’re not offering enough to make it worth somebody’s while.

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Thursday morning buffet

Simple.  Nourishing.

• Finally, a media headline about college footballers not making money that points the finger in the NFL’s direction.
• Over the past five years, Georgia has been one of the slower offenses in the game.  But things have been speeding up recently.
• More Willie Martinez love:  “No Georgia defensive player has gone before the third round since the Indianapolis selected cornerback Tim Jennings in 2006 in round two with the 62nd overall pick.”
• It’s nice that the Peach Bowl name will be making a reappearance, but the BCS commissioners’ fixation with naming is getting a little weird.
• Richt says J.J. Green will stay on offense.  One thing about Green that impressed me at G-Day was that he showed good hands snagging a high, hard pass.  If he can offer some blitz protection, he definitely looks like a contributor on passing downs.
• You know this is shit Nick Saban doesn’t have time for.
• Sounds like Bill Hancock’s gotten a little sensitive about the old order he’s been defending:  “There are two letters that are not associated with this name,” Hancock said.  Hey, nobody ever said being a flack was easy.
• NCAA ponders waiving the waiver process for 6-7 teams that want to go bowling.

The right man for the job

If D. J. Fluker’s agent has problems to deal with because of this tweet, maybe he should hire Jay Jacobs to get to the bottom of it.

Them what’s got the gold make the rules.

Good piece in today’s The Chronicle of Higher Education about the slow growth in multi-year scholarships being offered after the NCAA last year adopted a policy allowing programs to guarantee athletics aid for multiple years.  I think it shows that schools are feeling their way around what works for them on this front.

When things shake out, it’ll make for a useful recruiting tool, particularly for schools that can’t match the resources that some of the big boys tout.

Instead of offering more guaranteed aid, the most powerful programs are relying on their rich athletics traditions, broad television exposure, and other advantages over less-wealthy foes. But a handful of power programs appear to be using multiyear aid as a recruiting inducement in the biggest sports.

Florida says it has given multiyear awards to “pretty much every eligible football player.” At Ohio State, more than half of its 41 new offers of multiyear aid went to football and basketball players.

Some mid-major programs are using the four-year guarantees as points of differentiation against bigger programs. Fresno State University handed out 425 multiyear awards this year—one for every scholarship athlete—says Jason Clay, an assistant director of communications. One reason, he says, was to reduce pressure on students who had to compete for spots every year.

Other mid-major officials say they are open to multiyear agreements when athletes demand it.

“We’re not out there selling it, but if a student-athlete says, ‘I want a two-year deal,’ or, ‘I want this guaranteed for four years,’ we can certainly do that,” says Mario Moccia, athletic director at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

All of which makes me hope that Texas, the richest program in D-1 athletics, loses a few kids along the way because of its arrogance.

“Who gets a four-year, $120K deal guaranteed at age 17?” Christine A. Plonsky, women’s athletic director at the University of Texas, wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle. “The last thing young people need right now is more entitlement.”

Yeah, save entitlement for things like the Longhorn Network, bitches!

I guess Plonsky’s point is that at Texas, what’s sauce for the goose 50ish-year old head coach in the form of a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract with buyout clause isn’t sauce for the gander student-athlete.  And they say youth is wasted on the young.

The evolution of amateurism

I’ve never been a big fan of Andrew Zimbalist, so if there’s a part of something he’s authored that resonates with me… well, you read this:

Today, “pay for play” refers to compensating an athlete as an employee. Before 1957, it meant awarding athletic scholarships. That year, the NCAA coined and mandated the term “student athlete” as part of an effort to protect itself from workers’ compensation claims.

As college sports grew and became less a campus extracurricular than a lucrative business enterprise, programs complained about and violated rules so often that the NCAA took step after step away from its original notion of amateurism, allowing athletic scholarships in 1948 and termination of financial aid if a student stopped playing in 1967, permitting coverage of educational expenses in 1957, and prohibiting multiyear scholarships in 1973.

One thing you can say about that trend is that it doesn’t favor the player.  The context makes it hard to disagree with his argument.

“In short, amateurism in intercollegiate athletics is whatever the NCAA says it is,” reads the report, written by Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College, and Allen Sack, president of the Drake Group, which advocates for academic integrity and greater balance in college athletics. “The NCAA maintains its own, idiosyncratic, changing, frequently arbitrary, and often illogical definition of amateurism. NCAA restrictions on college athletes’ free participation in the lucrative market for their images, likenesses and names are obviously not necessary to uphold the principles of amateurism, which are constantly changing to meet industry needs.”

When students become athletes, they sign an agreement with the NCAA that essentially gives the association ownership over their names and images. The NCAA and video game companies can profit from using photos of the athletes or  images that strongly resemble them for as long as they like, and the athletes never see a penny.

Sack, a professor of sport management at the University of New Haven, said that to share this revenue with athletes “is no more a violation of amateurism than paying for their educations, or conditioning the renewal of their scholarships each year on athletic performance.”

Compare that with the NCAA’s official position on O’Bannon, which is that it doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about.

“Amateurism is what separates college sports from pro sports, and the NCAA membership has decided that those who participate in intercollegiate athletics should be students first and not paid professional athletes,” he said. “The NCAA does not limit how a student-athlete takes advantage of his or her likeness after college.”

That’s some impressive smoke blowing there.

Tuesday morning buffet

The line is open, so grab a plate.

• SEC Network announcement is postponed in the wake of the Boston Marathon tragedy.
• I don’t know what it is about Les Miles and head coach rankings, but Athlon, it’s real simple:  any head coach with a national title and a program that’s a perennial contender in the SEC West is a better head coach than Dan Mullen, for starters.
• Another weird list.  I mean, Jeremy Hill is one of the top ten players to watch in the SEC?  Good player and all, but still…
• Texas State’s move to FBS football has its costs.
• Georgia Tech decides it needs to go shopping for recruits out of state, while Vanderbilt keeps adding on Georgia kids.  I guess James Franklin agrees with the Genius: “I certainly think there’s people in Georgia that can meet the academics.”
• Year2 looks at how technology is running ahead of NCAA recruiting rules.  No surprise there.
• He also maps SEC historical series here and SEC East historical series here, if you’re interested.
• Possible opening day note:  Clemson loses its starting TE to ACL tear suffered in spring game.

Who pays to play?

John Infante’s post about paying young basketball players is a useful exercise in trying to climb out of the box the NCAA’s amateurism standard has placed college athletics.  Rather than putting the burden on the schools to change, he’s looked instead for a path to incentive the NBA to abandon the way it does business.  The sooner the pros will pay a kid, the more pressure that takes off the colleges to do so.

Paying college basketball players without fixing the system immediately below it also threatens to simply shift problems downward. To fix basketball, everyone needs to get what they want. The best prospects need the shortest path to a pro career. The NBA needs a system to evaluate players before they are drafted or signed. And the NCAA wants a supply of talented players who are committed to college.

Read the whole thing.  I’m not suggesting it’s a complete panacea.  And I don’t know how much of what he proposes translates neatly to football.  But it’s a good place to start a discussion about how to fix things.

Bob Stoops, company man

This “damn, son, I don’t think I would have said that” observation is making the rounds today:

“I tell my guys all the time,” Stoops says, “you’re not the first one to spend a hungry Sunday without any money.”

Thanks, Coach, for that spoonful of sugar.

And before you get all he’s-got-a-point-there on me, John Infante has your rebuttal.

As a policy matter, Stoops appears to not have considered the counter to his argument. The accusation advanced by groups like the National College Players Association is not that players do not get enough. It is that they are going into the red; that the limits on what a full grant-in-aid can pay for impose a cost on athletes that runs into the tens of thousands of dollars over four or five years. Stipends and full cost-of-attendance scholarships are not about pay-for-play. They are well within the NCAA’s definition of amateurism since they cover actual and necessary expenses of being a student-athlete.

The other problem is the perception of a football coach making $4 million a year telling athletes to suck it up and go hungry. Whenever an institution says their problem is messaging, not what they believe but how they communicate it, the institution is roundly criticized. But it is a serious problem for the NCAA. Many of the people attempting to defend the NCAA’s definition of amateurism and whether it is appropriate in college athletics are doing as much damage as the critics.

Beyond that, don’t forget that one of the reasons schools can afford to pay the likes of Stoops $4 million a year is because they’re paying what they are to the hired help in the name of amateurism.  I guarantee you Stoops hasn’t.

“If you want to compete [in Division I],” he says, “you’ve got to step up.”

The NCAA is still trying to reach a consensus on player stipends.  It’s not going well.  Besides the obvious fault line – there being a lot of schools that either don’t have the money or don’t want to spend the money in that fashion – there’s also a leetle problem with leadership, as nicely understated by Brad Wolverton:

In some ways, the issue has become a referendum on Mr. Emmert, whose attempts to get things done quickly have alienated certain factions.

‘Ya think?

One thing not mentioned in the article that I wonder about is whether some of these schools have begun factoring O’Bannon into the equation.  If that case, either through a settlement or a loss in the courts, results in player compensation from the schools, why toss another $2000 a year their way?

The scheduling problem that refuses to die

Missouri’s AD, after observing that the SEC is pretty satisfied with a 14-school conference – at least for the moment, anyway – goes on to mention that “… there remains debate about whether the league could go from an eight-conference game format to nine.”

Likely translation:  the networks (CBS in particular) still haven’t been impressed enough by the sheer genius of Mike Slive to pony up the kind of money the conference thinks it deserves from this round of expansion, but are willing to talk turkey if there’s more product.

My prediction is that if there’s more TV money for a school in a ninth conference game than in a seventh home game against a non-conference cupcake opponent, then we’ll get that added SEC game.  The coaches won’t be happy, but money talks louder.  Besides, they’ll be mollified with some sort of assurance that the selection committee will take into account how tough the conference is.