Pushing the envelope, Dawgie style

There’s really no other way to categorize what Richt did with the Crowell-in-the-backfield recruiting stunt as anything other than a violation, but note McGarity’s hair-splitting:

… Per McGarity’s letter, “Coach Richt knew that the team could not use equipment or run a play to create a tryout activity but did not not check with the Compliance Office beforehand about the offensive alignment.”  [Emphasis added.]

The Bulldogs asked for a ruling from the SEC regarding the matter and were told that the formation was indeed a violation of an NCAA bylaw aimed at restricting “game day simulation” for visiting prospects.

UGA hopes the violation will be considered secondary in nature.

“UGA does not believe a recruiting advantage was gained as the PSA’s mother has stated that her son knew he was going to attend UGA since he was a young child,” McGarity’s letter stated.

I guess now he knows about the offensive alignment.

6-7 seasons will do that to a coach.

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UPDATE: This tremor was so brief that none of us felt it.

https://twitter.com/#!/GentryEstes247/status/47359722487152640

Happy shiny people in red and black

More cancer talk, this time from Aaron Murray:

“I think we have some great leaders and a bunch of guys who want to follow,” Murray said. “In years past, we’ve had some great leaders and some guys who wanted to follow, but also some guys who didn’t want to buy in and were pulling away. They were pulling those followers toward them instead of those guys really trying to lead the team in the right direction.

“I don’t think we have those guys this year. I can’t name one guy who’s trying to pull this team back. We don’t have that anymore. We have the leaders and the followers who are working their tails off to follow those leaders.”

What’s the rush?

Shorter Doug Segrest:  given that a little over a month has passed since National Signing Day and Georgia hasn’t already wrapped up another top five class for 2012, perhaps it’s time to panic.

“I personally think that it’s the greatest injustice in American sports.”

ESPN boldly goes where… well, yeah, others have gone before, presenting the side of Andrew Schwarz, a Bay Area antitrust economist who strongly feels that it’s time to pay college players.  And he’s got some jazzed up financial statistics to back his position up.

• The NCAA should count institutional payments to athletic departments as revenue, because some athletic departments give money back to their schools and because such payments to athletic departments should be seen as marketing fees, “given that sports teams provide enormous publicity for universities”.
• And I love this:  “Tuition, the largest chunk of any athletic scholarship, carries no real hard cost, as it’s just a seat in a classroom (though it could count as an opportunity cost, if it’s true that seat would have been taken by a non-athlete paying full tuition).”

So when they do the revised math, Schwarz and ESPN come up with a whopping 81 schools which didn’t lose money on athletics in 2008-9, with that number growing to 99 for the next financial year.

But even with those numbers, of course, there’s still a huge difference between the schools at the top and the schools at the bottom.  Which leads to this “it’s so easy” dismissal by Schwartz.

… The idea of being able to offer a blue-chip recruit a scholarship, plus some, terrifies Ross Bjork, athletic director at Western Kentucky University. “That could be a scary day because then you’d get into the have-and-have-not discussion, where our budget is $20 million and their budget is $100 million. They can pay their athletes more.”

Karl Benson, commissioner of the Western Athletic Conference, invoked the possibility of implications from Title IX. “The day that the NCAA permits pay-for-play, if it’s done for only a certain class of student-athlete — football and men’s basketball — there will be lawsuits that follow from other sports. The gender equity issues would be massive unless you paid every student-athlete, regardless of sport or gender, the same amount.”

Schwarz dismissed those fears as unfounded, noting that Title IX, a federal law designed to promote equitable educational opportunities, does not require that schools spend equally on men and women. Texas spent $8.7 million on men’s basketball last year, $4.3 million on women’s basketball, a gender disparity reflected in overall spending for the athletic department, too. Yet, Texas stays out of Title IX hot water because half of its athletes, like half of its campus undergraduates, are women.

As for Bjork’s expressed concern, Schwarz said the glamour schools get the best talent today, even without the ability to offer more than an athletic scholarship.

“Right now, we see big programs beating up on small programs for the first few weeks of college football season, so we already have that,” he said. “It is just that the people on the big team would have, I don’t know, $40,000 a year in their pocket and the people on the small teams might just be getting a scholarship. But it wouldn’t change the allocation of talent much at all when it is all done. There might be a little bit of shifting in conferences…

“A little bit”?  Right.  Besides that, if you think coaches like Nick Saban are ruthless about culling the herd now, wait ’til you see what they do when they’ve got kids who aren’t contributing but are getting paid forty grand a year to take up a roster spot.  And there’s nothing said in the article about how schools would make up the shortfall which their non-revenue programs would face when the moneys which were previously spent on them are re-routed to pay players’ salaries in revenue sports.

But no matter.  In the end, Schwartz does a little John Lennon-esque dreaming.

“Imagine a world in which paying the athletes wasn’t a problem, wasn’t an infraction, and what those [NCAA] enforcement people were doing was actually making sure the people in sports programs were students,” he said. “With one cross-out of one NCAA bylaw, you could free up a lot of resources and get rid of a lot of bureaucracy. You could let the market prevail and find ways to really achieve the ideal of the student-athlete.”

I’m sure that would make Cecil Newton happy.  And the NFL.

The morning after on the Plains

With Friday’s dismissal of the four players arrested on armed robbery charges, Gene Chizik’s got a helluva job ahead of him.  And, no, it’s not making people like Scarbinsky happy.  It’s this:

The arrests and quick dismissal of four Auburn football players won’t dramatically change the Tigers’ 2011 opening day lineup, but it has created more holes on a roster that will be radically different than the one that won the national championship eight weeks ago.

The Tigers have lost at least 32 players since they beat Oregon for the BCS title, including five players who have been dismissed following arrests in the last two weeks. [Emphasis added.]

The good news there is that the dismissed kids didn’t make the situation much worse.  The bad news is that the roster was already thinned out before the arrests.

… Auburn returns only three starters on offense and three on defense, and neither of its kickers.

The Tigers must replace their top passer and rusher, in quarterback Cam Newton; three of their four top receivers; and seven of their top nine tacklers.

The high-profile work will come when the Tigers seek to replace their three juniors who have left for the NFL draft. Gone are Newton, defensive tackle Nick Fairley and wide receiver Darvin Adams and their considerable statistics. Auburn is also losing 24 seniors, 20 of whom either started or played a significant role last season.

Piece of cake.