Check out the numbers Jon Solomon compiled in his report.
Only the Big East and the Big Ten had no schools which averaged signing 25 players or more per year in their 2006-10 signing classes.
… According to SI.com, 25 of the 120 Football Bowl Subdivision teams averaged more than 25 signees a year between 2006 and 2010. That includes eight SEC teams: Ole Miss, Auburn, Mississippi State, Arkansas, Kentucky, Alabama, LSU and South Carolina.
Troy leads the nation with 32.8 signees per year. Half of the Big 12’s soon-to-be 10 members average more than 25. So does half of Conference USA, including UAB, which averages 25.8.
It’s tough to make that competitive advantage argument when so many schools are oversigning. And how many of them really care about taking advantage of student-athletes with the practice? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Get The Picture 
Once more, the Senator exposes the smoke-and-mirrors-straw-man-paper-tiger excuse used by the B1G 10(11, 12, 14, whatever).
Well done.
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Actually, he really didn’t do that at all.
And why do you not care that Georgia is greatly disadvantaged by having 30-40 players to choose from every 4 years than most of its SEC rivals?
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Expect Jon Solomon and his editor to be fired from the Birmingham News soon.
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Solomon is a Maryland grad. So he is the rare SEC West local reporter willing to call out this obviously unethical practice. The rest are fans of oversigning programs, so they defend it or at least refuse to talk about it.
Hopefully this is just a start for Solomon. The SEC West coaches aren’t threatened by reports about oversigning. What really freaks them out is being publicly asked to explain their numbers.
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Once again, Senator, you show how little you understand this topic.
Oversigning cannot be seen simply by looking at overall numbers. While high numbers suggest the likelihood of it, they do not necessarily indicate the presence of it.
You seriously drew that conclusion from Solomon’s list?
8 SEC teams are in the top 15 of Solomon’s list. The other 7 teams are from what are historically awful to mediocre football programs. So the obvious competitive advantage oversigning brings would move them from being awful/mediocre… to mediocre or occasionally above average.
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TD, that’s been my point all along.
It’s the underlying issues that may or may not be questionable, not the actual number of kids who sign in a given class. Technically, Georgia’s class may wind up numbering as many as 30, but I don’t think Richt has done anything sketchy to get there.
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TD, that’s been my point all along.
It’s the underlying issues that may or may not be questionable, not the actual number of kids who sign in a given class.
That wasn’t my point. My point was that high numbers can occasionally not require oversigning.
Technically, Georgia’s class may wind up numbering as many as 30, but I don’t think Richt has done anything sketchy to get there.
1) Georgia won’t sign 30.
2) If it does, that is a seriously unethical move because it then puts university employees in a position where their objectivity regarding student decisions is automatically compromised.
BTW, I could give two shits about the competitive advantage argument. Nobody is breaking any rules; it’s just that some schools choose to pursue greater numbers than others.
You say you don’t care about it, but then you love to taunt other conferences via the “S-E-C!” thing. Well, you are heavily enabled in doing that by the huge competitive advantage that comes via oversigning.
Big 10 schools, Florida, Vanderbilt, Georgia, and others could oversign and roster purge and thereby have 30-40 more options with which to fill holes every 4 years. They don’t. Because they aren’t completely unethical and academically pathetic institutions.
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As to Georgia’s class: it’s at 23 right now, with five offers sitting out there right now I know Georgia will honor if accepted. There are a couple of kids on top of that who are sign and place possibilities. Things may not wind up at thirty, but they’ll be closer than you think.
As for this: You say you don’t care about it, but then you love to taunt other conferences via the “S-E-C!” thing. Well, you are heavily enabled in doing that by the huge competitive advantage that comes via oversigning. … that’s pretty lame. And if you’re talking “huge competitive advantage”, nothing in the world of college football is bigger than the money and branding that flows to schools like Texas, ‘Bama and Georgia. Including oversigning.
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And I wouldn’t deny money makes for a huge competitive advantage for those schools. (Nor have I said oversigning or the lack thereof explains every variation in performance in CFB, that Georgia would be better than Alabama right now w/o oversigning, or anything else you may be thinking along these lines.)
If you want to debate whether something should be done to minimize the money advantage, that’s fine. But it’s a completely different topic. Oversigning is a separate topic about something else that provides a huge competitive advantage.
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As to Georgia’s class: it’s at 23 right now, with five offers sitting out there right now I know Georgia will honor if accepted. There are a couple of kids on top of that who are sign and place possibilities. Things may not wind up at thirty, but they’ll be closer than you think.
1) We don’t know how the offers have been given, what they are contingent upon, what has been said in private, etc. And even commitment numbers don’t tell us everything. We have to wait for the actual signings to know who is oversigned. (Though with programs like Alabama, LSU, and Ole Miss, who currently have commitments whose signings will put them 10 or more over the limit and who have past records of being oversigners, it’s not hard to make some obvious conclusions about the signing numbers to come.)
2) Georgia currently has 26 scholarships to give. But it also has 2 players (Frix, Faloughi) that were walk-ons until being given scholarships last year when Georgia was under 85. If Frix and Faloughi were told that they would be given these scholarships on a 1-year basis, depending upon future year signings, then there is nothing unethical about moving the scholarships elsewhere. They arrived at school never expecting to have a scholarship.
Greg McGarity has personally assured me and others I know (in very clear terms) that Georgia will never oversign. If Georgia were to be 4 over after next week, then he will be hearing from me. I take him at his word though and thus highly doubt that we will end up over 26/28.
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TD, you might want to take note of something Seth Emerson posted at his blog today:
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BTW, I could give two shits about the competitive advantage argument. Nobody is breaking any rules; it’s just that some schools choose to pursue greater numbers than others. It’s what some schools do to some student-athletes that’s problematic for me.
Ironically, if there’s a rules change on this front, I’ll bet you five bucks it’ll be because of the former, rather than the latter.
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Let’s be honest about what has happened here, Senator.
You love to do recurring topics, and one of those has long been a “Big 10/Jim Delany sucks! S-E-C rules!” thing. Understandable and I was once one of those as well. I also usually dismiss the “my school is good/other school is bad” stuff of internet message boards. UGA is no Harvard, has plenty of Harricks and Jan Kemps in its past, etc.
That said:
You aren’t very well-versed on oversigning, how it works, and what it requires. You are finally starting to look into it a little more and are making some common errors that most who are new to the topic make. Again, understandable.
But oversigning requires unethical behavior. The two cannot be separated. A school that is oversigned automatically compromises its ability to give impartial advice to its students.
You and Alabama fans may go on and explain all the transfers, medical DQs, academic failures, undisclosed violations dismissals, and all the rest that come later as being justifiable in every single case, but even were that laughably unrealistic claim completely true, the school still would have behaved unethically by allowing its employees to be in such a compromised position.
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TD, don’t get me wrong, I love being patronized as much as the next guy, but you’ve seriously mischaracterized something here. Jim Delany takes a lot of grief at GTP because he might be the biggest asshole in college sports. Conference affiliation has absolutely nothing to do with it. It’s not that I do much SEC cheerleading here as it is responding to stupid comments which indicate a certain inferiority complex.
As for your position that oversigning requires unethical behavior, well, I respect it, but I can’t say that I agree.
And before you go there, that’s not to say it’s going to bother me if the NCAA changes the rules to prohibit it in the future.
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Then you should ask yourself why the officials at all but a very few universities find it to be unethical.
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I would say that 25 out of 120 is more than a very few.
And those are just the programs that have averaged 25 per year over the past four. I’m sure there are more schools that have violated your standards on an occasional basis.
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