Nobody wants to kill the golden goose.

I wouldn’t say that Ivan Maisel’s interview with Bill Hancock contains any big surprises, but once you get past Hancock’s nonsensical lip service about not letting a D-1 football postseason interfere with academics, it’s very, very obvious that the people running college athletics don’t trust themselves enough to stop bracket creep from screwing up the good thing they know they have.

And, no, that’s not a compliment.

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The Artlessness of the Deal

John Infante’s rebuttal to the indentured servitude argument that gets thrown the NCAA’s way is so spot on I’m tempted to add “The Deal” to the Lexicon just so I can use it as shorthand in response to every future whine about paying student-athletes to play.

… The onus then in put on the NCAA to improve the deal it offers to student-athletes. And not just at the margins in terms of multi-year scholarships or better training. Rather, the NCAA membership is pressured to change the fundamentals of the agreement by eliminating the restrictions on profiting from one’s athletic ability and/or reducing or eliminating the academic requirements.

But it was not the NCAA who made the current deal offered to student-athletes the only one available. It was the NFL and NBA who took advantage of the fact that the NCAA operates the only 18-23 year old developmental league at zero cost to the professional league it feeds athletes into in the world. If Division I athletics were not played at the level they are, it would be both unconscionable and unprofitable to both bar high schoolers from entering the professional ranks and refuse to operate a minor league focused on development.

Make sure you read it all.

2011 SEC Quarterbacks – a meme to watch?

I’m going to go out on a limb and presume that the top two players on Chris Low’s list of the 25 best players in the SEC last season are Newton and Fairley… which means that he doesn’t have a single quarterback returning this season in his grouping.

Now that’s not completely out of line in the sense that only six players on Low’s list return for 2011, but still, it feels different.  How many times in the last decade can you say there wasn’t an elite quarterback in this conference coming back for another year?

Fine tuning contrition

My first thought upon reading about the latest stop on the Exactly How Sorry Is Jim Tressel? Tour was whether Gordon Gee worries that he upset his head coach by suggesting too easy a penalty at the start.