Heads he wins; tails you lose.

No matter which way the recruiting winds blow, Corch is cool with ’em.

Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer applauded the move by the NCAA this week to table the relaxation of several recruiting rules that would have made the pursuit of prospects an almost 24/7/365 exercise.

…

“One of the concerns I know our staff has and the Big Ten has — the fall is for coaching your players,” Meyer said. “If it’s unlimited phone calls and all that stuff, then you’re spending all of your evenings calling recruits. We don’t need to speed up the process any more. I think recruiting, the calendar, is perfect the way it is.”

Yet Meyer said Ohio State is poised to add personnel to the recruiting effort if the proposed rules allowing more people to be involved ultimately is passed. Two-time defending national champion Alabama was in the process of doing the same thing.

“We’re still evaluating the landscape,” Meyer said. “I think Alabama does a nice job. They staff up pretty good. … And we’re going to do certainly (what it takes) to be competitive.”

And that’s the thing.  It’s not like ‘Bama and Ohio State are going to suffer with the revocation of deregulation.  The recruiting powerhouses were doing just fine under the old arrangement.  In fact, you could argue that the new rules might have helped some schools who were willing to take advantage of the opportunity to be more creative narrow the gap.

But if what you care about most is spending money… well, Urban Meyer’s okay with that.

If Todd Gurley’s starting to scare me, what’s he gonna do to opposing defenses?

If this doesn’t qualify as Dawg porn, I don’t know what does.

Richt and offensive coordinator Mike Bobo have remarked that they thought Todd Gurley looked slimmer this spring. He’s not.

The tailback said he’s actually up to 234 pounds. “I feel good,” he said. “I think it’s just from all the running we’ve been doing and lifting and mat drills and then just stretching. I just feel so much better. The best I’ve ever felt.”

Good Lord – he’s gained weight, but his coaches think he looks trimmer?  Hoo, boy.

In the loop

Interesting…

Coach Mark Richt said he didn’t know Murray was going to Oklahoma until after he told reporters and hadn’t spoken to him about it since he returned, but both Richt and offensive coordinator Mike Bobo said they viewed the trip as positive because Murray again was working to get better.

“I’m glad he went, I’m glad he got value out of it,” Richt said. “But I didn’t talk too much about it. … It’s just a guy pursuing excellence.”

Kinda funky to think that in this day and age, there are still things the average fan can learn about at the same time the head coach does.

“We are not suggesting any regulatory scheme for capping or restricting coaches’ compensation.”

Nah, of course not… the U.S.  Secretary of Education is just sayin’:

Escalating coaches’ salaries are the single largest contributing factor to the unsustainable growth of athletic expenditures. And we believe that universities and colleges must start rethinking coaches’ compensation, at least in the Division I revenue sports.

If universities and colleges want to readjust a coach’s priorities, they need to change the penalties and incentives they offer coaches.

And why is Duncan convinced drastic action must be taken?

Coaches today earn whatever the market pays. But many coaches work at public universities, funded with taxpayer dollars. In 2011, in Oklahoma, Connecticut and Maryland, a head football or basketball coach was not only the highest-paid employee at the university but the highest-paid state employee.

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin earned $147,000 in 2011, while the football coach at the University of Oklahoma, Bob Stoops, was paid $4.875 million, 33 times as much as Gov. Fallin. Moreover, nine Oklahoma football assistant coaches were paid more than the governor, including the tight ends/tackles coach, who pulled down a $240,000 salary.

Successful head coaches’ salaries should be tied to what their governors make?  Good luck with that argument, fellas.  Does Fallin have a tie-in shoe deal?

Jim Delany’s fear of spending

John Infante looks at where the Big Ten is on the NCAA’s push to deregulate recruiting and finds that the problem for that conference is that the SEC is more of a lean, mean footballin’ machine.

So while the SEC as a whole has more revenue and spends more on football, it potentially has more resources to redirect to football. Fewer teams means less overhead. Direct costs can be cut with roster restrictions, more regional and local scheduling, or straight budget cuts. Each new dollar that comes in has fewer mouths to feed. When the conference expands, the Big Ten has to divert more resources toward more nonrevenue sports for travel.

The problem is not that the Big Ten is already being outspent by the SEC, because at the top of the conference that is not true. The bigger issue for the Big Ten is that it already spends more on football but cannot overturn the other advantages the SEC has in terms of prestige, recruiting hotbeds, and attracting top coaches. And if schools are all of the sudden able to spend more on football, Big Ten schools appear less able to do so than SEC schools. Any increased revenue will potentially be fought over by more sports in the Big Ten.

Infante thinks this means that Delany’s comments about reclassifying the Big Ten to a DIII conference are more threat than bluff, because its schools are already structured more like schools on that level.  That begs two questions, though.

Infante raises one himself:

In that future, the Big Ten is philosophically closer to Division III or the Ivy League than it is to the SEC. To catch-up to the SEC, it would need to disband teams wholesale. A whole conference closing up teams in the way Maryland and Cal originally did over the last few years is a very tough sell. Then again, so is dropping between one and three levels of football and basketball competition. The real question would be just how much the Big Ten values competing against like-minded schools.  [Emphasis added.]

Yeah, that Ohio State home opener against Kenyon College doesn’t have quite the panache that, say, Texas would bring to the table.  This isn’t a cliff Jim Delany’s jumping off unless he’s holding hands with a fellow major conference commissioner or two – and that’s going to be a helluva sales job for a man who prefers the bully pulpit to sweet talk.

But here’s the second thing.  There’s no mandate requiring a formula about how Big Ten schools, or any other schools, have to spend money on their athletics.  All of them make choices, both on the micro level of allocating the departments’ revenues on various programs and on the macro level as each decides how much support all of their sports deserve.

On the first level, Dan Wetzel gets to the weakness of Delany’s position:

Within the huge budgets of a major university, athletic revenue remains a drop in the bucket. Delany’s assertion that football and men’s basketball must support non-revenue sports – rather than, say, the history department or the dorm heating bill – is an attempt to make a moral claim on what is really an accounting and control issue. He is protecting athletic fiefdoms, where ADs dole out every penny, from funding decisions being made with a campus-wide view.

But, still, some might say, that’s a school’s choice.  Why should that choice be taken away with the imposition of an economic model that Delany warns would lay waste to the financial status quo?

The answer to that is athletic budgets don’t operate in a closed universe.

The University of Michigan, for instance, is a Big Ten member with an endowment of about $8 billion. If it wants a field hockey team, it can most certainly afford one. Cutting football players past and present in on some of the tens of millions that program generates or allowing them to profit off their own likeness or to put a percentage of jersey sales into a trust fund, isn’t going to bankrupt the school. And if Title IX can’t be reworked (and it almost assuredly can), then Michigan would do just that to comply with federal law.

What Delany is saying is that left to its own decision, Michigan won’t see field hockey as worth the money. He’s acknowledging that outside the myopic prism of the athletic department, gold-plated, non-revenue sports don’t make much sense.

Right now Michigan athletics gets 100 percent of the revenue and things roll on. If the players get a cut, then it will have to “reduce opportunities for student-athletes overall.”

So it’s the players’ share of the revenue – the money the O’Bannon case is trying to divert – that is propping up the other sports … the same other sports that Delany doesn’t believe the university itself considers a sound investment.

And that’s really it – Big Ten schools want to have the programs; they just don’t want to pay for the programs with their own moneys.  And that gets to the heart of what’s being fought over in O’Bannon.  As Wetzel puts it, “if Michigan doesn’t think it should pay for a field hockey team, then why does it think Denard Robinson should?”

Now that’s a question I’d love to hear Delany answer.

No wonder recruits are flocking to the Flats.

Shorter Paul Johnson:  The reason Tech’s recruiting is mediocre is because the parents suck, the kids suck and their high school coaches suck.  Oh, and an early signing period would mean I wouldn’t have to work as hard.

“I never went to South Beach.”

Instead of punishing A.J. Green over the jersey nonsense, the NCAA should have given him a major pat on the back for having the good judgment and sense to steer clear of the whole Marvin Austin debacle.

What a joke.

The world’s strangest business model

Minnesota claims that it was never the intent that the school turn a profit on beer and wine sales at football games.

At least it was successful at that.

Jim Delany needs a new pair of shoes.

Jim Delany’s offended shoe pusher Sonny Vaccaro with his escape to DIII comments?  Shit’s gettin’ real, dawg:

“It’s the most irrational statement I’ve ever seen from a person who’s in power to do something for the players,” Vaccaro said. “Pay-for-play is not a true statement. What it is and what it always will be is compensation for these kids when they’re no longer at the school so they’re part of the process.”

Vaccaro makes a good point about certain real world ramifications if Delany made good on his word to flee.

Vaccaro said Delany’s comments are “insane” given that conferences such as the Big Ten are “too big to fail.” Vaccaro questions what happens in a deemphasized model to contractual obligations with TV and shoe companies, not to mention how universities would pay off debt they’re running up to build athletic facilities.

“What I would have hoped is people like this in authority overlooking the athletes, because they have no legal representation, is let’s do the right thing by the participants,” Vaccaro said. “Let’s understand the world has changed. Basically, it was a threat so the public thinks the players are wrong.

“If that’s what they want to do, they should do it without funding new stadiums and paying millions of dollars to themselves. What Mr. Delany does not admit to is the value of the Big Ten Network to pay the salaries. If this happens, then Mr. Delany and his whole office will be out of work.”

Now that’s happening.  And the final word:

“I’m so glad Mr. Delany felt fit to talk about the student-athlete relationship vs. the university,” Vaccaro said. “He failed to mention the academic scandal at the University of Minnesota (in the 1990s). If you follow the bouncing ball, the Big Ten players have now started their three-week migration throughout America to play in a basketball tournament. It’s so hypocritical. I was happy by what he said so the public can understand they’re so blinded by the commitments they already started.”

It’s not easy to cede the moral high ground to Sonny Vaccaro.  Well played, Commissioner.

Mark Richt has lost control over playcalling.

Evidently yesterday’s meme of the day was Mike “you never sausage a place” Bobo’s contentment with being in Athens.  (Now we know McGarity’s secret weapon in contract negotiations.)  But in the midst of the sausage fest, Marc Weiszer caught an interesting quote from Richt about his offensive coordinator:

“Mike and I have worked together for so long now that if I study red zone and he studies red zone and we compare notes and we watch it separately, it’s about 90 percent identical,” Richt said. “It’s not like that I need to have a lot of input. There might be times I slip a little something to him on the side and say, ‘Hey, if you like it, good. If you don’t, that’s fine, too.’ I know what it’s like to be an offensive coordinator and to call plays when your head coach is kind of the guy you’ve replaced as the play-caller. I know it can be tough at times, but Mike’s handed everything really well.”

That’s the sound of a man who’s comfortable.  In fact, as Emerson notes, it sounds like Richt’s been more comfortable with Bobo than Bobo’s been comfortable with Bobo.

Bobo joked that his first year at Georgia he felt like a graduate assistant in the game-planning room. Richt was not only the offensive coordinator, but also a former college quarterback. Twelve years later, and five seasons into his tenure as offensive coordinator, Bobo said he has a much better comfort level — but not because Richt ever limited him. For instance, the wrinkles that Georgia has tried the past few years (the spread offense, the pistol, the no-huddle) it was mainly Bobo.

All in all, that’s a relationship that’s not ending any time soon.  If you’re the guy I sat in front of last year at the Auburn game, I’m sorry to tell you that.