Urban Meyer’s next target

Mike Bianchi doesn’t mind the view from seat 37F, evidently.

It’s great that the Florida Gators will build bronze statues outside Ben Hill Griffin Stadium that will honor Tim Tebow, Danny Wuerffel and Steve Spurrier, but aren’t the Gators forgetting somebody?

How about a statue for the two most important people in the program – the Unnamed Bail Bondsman and Huntley Johnson, the legendary local attorney who traditionally gets all of UF’s football players out of trouble when they get arrested?

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He should know.

David Greene, talking to David Hale about Aaron Murray’s situation this year, had this to say:

… I’d rather have an experience offensive line with a freshman quarterback than I would an inexperienced line with a veteran quarterback.

I bet he still has occasional nightmares about that 2003 offensive line.

Hines Ward: stay in (state) school, kids.

My favorite Dawg ever shows his alma mater some love in this clip:

(h/t Leather Helmet Blog)

Envy and jealousy: from hackery to flackery

Will Collier’s post on Ray Melick’s career move is so good it makes me wish Terence Moore had done something similarly ill-advised, just so I could steal it.

Socialism!

For nearly two years, the Knight Commission has studied the out-of-control spending in collegiate athletics, searching for solutions to help bridge the growing gap between the haves and have nots.

If the following list is the best the commission members could come up with, that’s two years of their lives they’ll never get back.

Rewarding schools that make academic values a priority, including the creation of an Academic-Athletics Balance Fund. The reform group recommends at least 20 percent of the overall funds available for BCS conference distributions be allocated to this fund.  The conferences then would take this allocation and distribute the funds to members who meet the following criteria: maintaining at least a 50 percent graduation rate; and showing an appropriate balance between investments in athletics and education.

The group also recommends strengthening eligibility requirements for championships: schools would only be eligible with a graduation rate of at least 50 percent.

The Commission also asked for greater transparency from universities, including better measures to compare athletics spending to academic spending.

It also asks for bowl games to end by early January, preventing athletes’ identities to be used to promote commercial entities; enforcing coaching limitations and reducing football scholarships from 85 to 75.

On the topic of coaches salaries, which continue to skyrocket, the commission recommends a ban on athletic staff members having separate contracts with apparel, equipment or shoe companies.

These people are detached from reality.  There’s nothing on that list that stands a snowball’s chance in hell of gaining general acceptance in the present day world of college athletics.  And I say that as someone who thinks that a reduction in the number of football scholarships would be a good thing, both for the cost savings and for the increase in competitiveness that would result.

But grandiose pronouncements that ignore economics won’t make it so.

“It’s vitally important to preserve the integrity of collegiate sports,” said Knight Commission member Carol Cartwright, president of Bowling Green. “The Committee believes we can no longer base shared revenue on winning but instead on maintaining the right balance between athletics and academics.”

I’m sure it does.  But I’m equally sure that ESPN, Fox and CBS could care less.

There’s a place for the balance she yearns for.  It’s called the Ivy League.

Like it or not – and based on this quote,

“The dynamic at work today is this disparity between the increasing athletic budgets and the decreasing or challenged academic budgets,” said Knight Commission Co-Chairman William E. “Brit” Kirwan, chancellor, University System of Maryland. “It creates a conflict of the principles of what institutions are founded to do and I think the time is right to embrace these recommendations.”

… it’s fair to say that the committee members line up in the “or not” group – driven by football, D-1 college athletics are heading towards a permanent split between the haves and the have-nots.  The only question is whether the politicians move to stop that from happening.

Friday morning buffet

A little of this, a little of that…

• One thing you can say about Brandon Boykin, he doesn’t set his sights low.
• After reading this flight of fantasy, I only have one question:  has anybody ever seen OrangeBloods.com’s Chip Brown and Jerry Jones together?  Just sayin’.
• And Jones says oh, no, he di’int.
• The Mountain West decides to stand pat at nine.  Bad move, fellas, at least in terms of chasing that BCS AQ slot.  You’ve swapped Utah for Boise State, which is okay from a competitive standpoint, but a disaster from a media market one.  And the bottom of your conference is a serious drag.
• In the wake of Utah’s move into the arms of the Pac-10, Matt Hayes goes looking for Orrin Hatch’s take… and hears crickets.  [UPDATE: Orrin speaks!]
• Patrick Garbin takes a look at the early spreads on some of Georgia’s games this year.
• According to Ivan Maisel, the rush to conference expansion really was about whose is bigger:  … as a senior official in another FBS conference said Tuesday, “If the Pac-10 had gone to 16, personalities and egos would force other conferences to do that.”
• Oregon State’s take on Pac-10 expansion is an interesting one.
• I have a rule that I don’t mention players running afoul of the law once they leave college, but if the guys at Barrel of Rum want me to make an exception in Derrick Morgan’s case, well, who am I to argue?
• Texas A & M’s president:  “We had no written offer from the SEC. What I knew was that if I wanted one, it was a phone call away.”