Thursday lunch buffet

Some items for your mid-day reading pleasure:

• Will Muschamp says he hired Charlie Weis to run the football.  Obviously, he didn’t check out Notre Dame’s rushing stats during Weis’ tenure before he made the call.
• Linebacker alignment and gap assignment talk from Shakin the Southland.
• Ohio State won’t pay for Jim Tressel’s lawyer.  Cheap bastards.
• Steve Megargee has noticed a trend about Arkansas and Texas high school coaches.
• If you’re interested, Georgia’s Liberty Bowl expenses are posted at The Wiz of Odds.
• As far as I’m concerned, the college football all-time name contest is over.
• Year2 makes the case for Kellen Moore’s senior season not being as good as last year.
• Non-football related, but you’d think a person would aspire to more than this.

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The SEC knows one thing Jesus wouldn’t do.

If the NFL lockout affects the regular season, the Southeastern Conference has no interest in filling the gap on Sundays.

“I’ve been around this conference for a long time and I would be shocked if that ever happened,” Larry Templeton, SEC consultant for television matters, said.

Templeton, who was the director of athletics at Mississippi State from 1987-2007, said the feeling he gets inside the conference office in Birmingham, Ala., is despite the perceived increase in exposure and obvious financial benefits to making such a similar move for other conferences, there’s still two days in the weekly calendar that considered sacred: Fridays and Sundays.

“I just don’t believe the Southeastern Conference would consider a proposal that touches playing college football on either of those two days,” Templeton said. “This conference has always maintained that in this part of the country Friday nights belongs to high school football and what Sunday represents for people goes without saying.”

A hot time will be had by all.

All I can say in response to this news is that I sure hope whoever is responsible for managing the concessions at Clemson home games has his or her act together better than the last time Georgia traveled to Death Valley.  Running out of ice in the second quarter on a humid day in the mid-90s ain’t my idea of efficient management.

Which reminds me of the oldest Clemson joke I know:  do you know why they don’t have ice water at Clemson?  The student who had the recipe graduated.  (I’ll be here all week; try the veal.)

Brian Kelly’s gold standard

Notre Dame’s head coach has an idea about what it’ll take to get his program some much needed street cred.

“Clearly, if I’m one of those average college football fans, I think I’m asking the same question,” Kelly told the group. “Notre Dame will be taken serious when they beat an SEC team.”

Only one glitch:  The Irish don’t have a game scheduled with an SEC opponent.

Mike Slive and the SEC Twelve play their newest hit, “Oversigning Blues”.

While we’re on the subject of cynicism and college football this morning, I think those who are getting excited about Seth Emerson’s report that Mike Slive intends to put oversigning legislation on the table at the SEC spring meetings in Destin might want to take a deep breath and read MaconDawg’s parsing of Slive’s comments.

Here are three things to keep in mind as the end of May approaches.

1. Nobody really knows what Mike Slive is thinking.  I’m sure we’ll see more of the “Mike Slive is 72 and is looking to cement his legacy” stuff that John Pennington pitches here (the Tony Barnhart column just about writes itself, doesn’t it?), but who’s to say that clamping down on oversigning is what he has in mind?  This may be little more than a gesture which allows Slive to say he took a stab at a PR problem, much to the media’s approval.  If nothing else, that’ll sure give the assembled multitudes something to write about for a week or so.
2. Slive has a lot of convincing to do.  Pennington’s head count is 7-5 against proposed legislation.  If anything, Pennington may be a little generous with the level of support, as I would expect Kentucky to line up with the opposition.  But even if you grant that Pennington’s numbers are spot on, which schools among that bunch will Slive be able to turn from the dark side?  And based on what arguments?
3. The broader the proposal, the harder the task.  Slive told Emerson, “We’ve put together what we call a bit of a package to address these issues, that will give our people a chance to think about these issues in a more global fashion.”  In other words, he’s not nibbling around the edges with his legislation.  How far it goes we don’t know, but the more he tosses in, the less likely it is that he’ll get anything to pass.  It’s one thing to ask Georgia to approve legislation that puts teeth into limits on grayshirting and oversigning, but how do you think the school would take to a proposal that prohibits it from placing players at JUCOs?  Answer:  not enthusiastically.  (The cynic in me wonders if Slive might overreach purposefully to sabotage his own proposal.)

I don’t know how this is going to play out.  As I said yesterday, I’m a little surprised that Slive has taken the offensive, but while that sells well in the media, it also gives the Alabamas and South Carolinas plenty of time to prepare their defenses.  One thing I do know about Slive is that he’s a consummate politician, which means he’s accomplished at knowing his constituents and counting heads.  If the support for change isn’t there, he’ll quickly regroup and move on.  Were I a betting man, I’d still put my money on the establishment of a study group when the dust settles.

Brilliant.

I freely admit to being a cynic.  Part of having a cynical nature is recognizing that there’s cynicism and then there’s world-class cynicism.  Me, I’m a rank amateur compared to Jim Delany.

Big Ten officials discussed a proposal that would pay athletes to help cover living expenses on top of their scholarships during the league’s spring meetings this week…

… Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany said league athletic directors and officials have seriously discussed whether they should use some of their growing TV revenue to pay athletes more.

That is so nice.  But keep in mind it’s a gesture with a price tag.

… Delany stressed that the Big Ten was merely at the discussion stage, but he added the league is interested in talking to other conferences to see if they also favor such a plan. He acknowledged many schools and conferences across the country couldn’t afford to cover those additional expenses, which could run about $300,000 a year just for football and men’s basketball players alone.

That’s 300 large – if you can get away with paying the full scholarships of players in just two sports.  Should it become a matter of treating all your scholarship players similarly, you’re suddenly in the neighborhood of a million dollars a year.  For an Ohio State, Texas or Georgia, that’s a line item in a budget that gets passed over quickly.  But if you’re a bottom feeder in a mid-major conference, it’s Mount Everest.  (Hell, for most of those schools, even the $300,000 would be a bear to come up with.)  Throwing that kind of expense on top of an athletic budget at a school that’s barely scraping by or losing money is an essentially insurmountable target.

Don’t think that Delany doesn’t know that.  Gene Smith sure does.

… But some Big Ten officials say if they can help out their athletes, then the concept of using the same rules for all teams should be abandoned. Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith said the stakes are simply higher for schools like his than for those in the MAC or Sun Belt.

“The reality is, if there’s cost of attendance and you can’t afford it, don’t do it,” Smith said. “The teams you’re trying to beat can’t do it either. Don’t do it because Ohio State’s doing it. That’s one of the things schools at that level get trapped into thinking.”

Adopt that and you create a world in which one set of schools is paying more scholarship money for its student athletes than another set.  In doing so, either you wind up cementing a permanent underclass within D-1, or you force a massive realignment of the have-nots into a lower division.  No matter which way you go, it’s a win for the power schools.

And best of all, you’re doing it in the name of the kids.  Who’s gonna argue with that?

Jim Delany is one scary sumbitch.