Believe it or not, arms races cost money.

This post is for those of you gullible enough to believe the story that most big time college programs lose money, because the NCAA says they do.

Clemson’s now got on the books projects for football and basketball that will cost around $125 million.  The news prompted this exchange on Twitter:

Clemson is spending an incredible amount of money on FB and BB projects supposedly addressed within about the past decade.

— Jon Solomon (@JonSolomonCBS) February 7, 2015

@JonSolomonCBS but everyone's broke, Jon!

— Andy Schwarz (@andyhre) February 7, 2015

@andyhre Exactly. Clemson did a major basketball arena renovation about 12 years ago & built new FB offices/locker room within a decade.

— Jon Solomon (@JonSolomonCBS) February 7, 2015

@JonSolomonCBS Clemson is one of the schools that supposedly "lost" money per NCAA methodology.

— Andy Schwarz (@andyhre) February 7, 2015

@andyhre Correct. And when I recently spoke to Clemson's AD, it wasn't clear yet if Clemson will spend COA on all athletes or just some.

— Jon Solomon (@JonSolomonCBS) February 7, 2015

That is what comes of cooking the books when you don’t have to pay market wages to your source of labor.

The funny thing is that some of you who swallow this bullshit are the same folks who chastise student-athletes for not doing their homework about whom they’re getting in bed with.

Amateurism, at its heart, is about getting people to romanticize about an entertainment industry.  P. T. Barnum would have made a helluva NCAA president.

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“Coach Lilly, did you order the Code Red?”

Even if the NCAA wanted to take on the coaches in fixing the screw job recruits face on signing day by coaching moves that have been conveniently kept under wraps by their recruiters – and it doesn’t – Kevin Trahan points out a more practical reason it won’t:

The NCAA is in major legal trouble right now, having lost the O’Bannon case and facing the possibly more challenging Kessler case in the coming years. The association has focused on proving that its athletes commit to schools, not coaches. In fact, the letter of intent states that:

I understand I have signed this NLI with the institution and not for a particular sport or coach. If a coach leaves the institution or the sports program (e.g., not retained, resigns), I remain bound by the provisions of this NLI. I understand it is not uncommon for a coach to leave his or her coaching position.

Athletes don’t sign the NLI to clarify this; they do it because they really have no other choice. In actuality, coaches have a major effect on the schools recruits choose, an ESPN poll found. Schools know this, and they also know there is no punishment for exploiting that relationship.

If the NCAA fixes this problem, it would be acknowledging that many recruits choose schools based on coaches, not just the schools themselves. This would not only place more scrutiny on the NIL program, it would also severely hurt the NCAA’s court arguments that athletes choose schools primarily because of education.

Making a change to support athletes is not worth that risk to the NCAA.

Add that to the list of potential targets in litigation for enterprising antitrust plaintiffs attorneys.  And just think who their star witness might be.

“It was everybody on the staff,” Macon County Athletic Director and football coach Larry Harold said Thursday. “Coach (John) Lilly was the first I heard from. We weren’t answering our phones, I wasn’t answering mine and he wasn’t answering his. All the sudden these text messages started coming in. They said, ‘RED ALERT: READ THIS.’ Somebody screen-shotted (the website) FootballScoop(.com) and it grew from there. It was crazy.”

Just another day in court for the NCAA

Major setback for everyone’s favorite collegiate sports organization yesterday:

The NCAA can’t seal hundreds of pages of internal emails and other documents in the defamation lawsuit filed against it by former USC running backs coach Todd McNair, the California 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled Friday.

The three-justice panel dismissed NCAA arguments that not sealing the documents would hinder investigations by the organization.

“We are not convinced by the NCAA’s contention that public disclosure of its documents will make future investigations more difficult for the NCAA to conduct,” the 16-page opinion said.

You didn’t believe this?

Laura Wytsma, representing the NCAA, told the court during the October hearing that the organization wasn’t trying to obscure “wrongful conduct.”

“The NCAA has been as transparent as it can be on this one,” she said.

Inconceivable!

Now comes the inevitable drip, drip of embarrassing revelations of NCAA overreach.  Damn, where have we heard that song before?

The situation is grim enough that it actually prompted a Stacey Osburn response.

Stacey Osburn, a spokesperson for the NCAA, released this statement:

“The NCAA remains fully committed to its obligation to member schools, student-athletes, and third-parties to protect the confidentiality of the infractions process. As such we are considering our options in light of the court’s decision.”

I’ll just bet you are, sweetheart.

Meanwhile, over in O’Bannon-land, Michael Hausfeld has decided that the best response to a motion to have his fees and costs reduced is to troll Mark Emmert.

“The value of succeeding should be measured in multiples of the value it cost the NCAA to lose,” O’Bannon lead attorney Michael Hausfeld said. “How many people did they have working on their case and what did it cost them to lose? Why don’t they produce what they spent? This wasn’t a tale of two lawsuits. This was a tale of one fraud. What the NCAA owes for losing is, in their terms, just the cost of doing bad business.”

If everyone got to penalize the NCAA for that, it would have to file for bankruptcy before the end of the year.

“Do you just turn the floodgates open with technology?”

It sounds  like college football is rapidly approaching the point when it won’t have any choice about that.

The National Federation of State High School Associations now allows any form of communication technology during high school football games outside the nine-yard marks, on the sidelines and during halftime. Smart phones continue to get smarter, and college football appears to have no way to prevent impermissible use of them.

“The way it is now it’s hard to enforce sort of unenforceable rules,” said Rogers Redding, national college football officiating coordinator. “You don’t really want officials checking in a team area to see what’s going on. High schools just opened it up and said, ‘Whatever you want to use, go ahead.’ They seem pretty happy about that. There’s always the issue of different resources and what’s available. You’ve got rich guys and poor guys. I’m sure we’ll talk about it.”

“Rich guys and poor guys”, eh?  This sounds like a job for AUTONOMY!

And it wouldn’t be today’s NCAA without at least one player-related tricky item.

One unanswered question: Do college players have to sign off on wearing sensors that could be used for commercial use? The idea of tracking sensors comes during a litigious time for the NCAA and its members, who are weighing whether to pay players for use of their name, image and likeness while the NCAA defends the “amateurism” concept.

“Weighing”?  More like being forcibly shoved.

By the way, why do articles like this regularly seem to use Urban Meyer to make a point (“Urban Meyer could have more time to commiserate with players and officials in 2015.”)?  I think it’s because he’s become the poster boy for the “don’t blame the coaches, blame the rules” crowd.  Nice reputation, Corch.

Now this is awkward.

There’s something highly amusing about an ESPN reporter seeking comment from ESPN about Bill Hancock telling ESPN to stuff it over the idea of moving the semi-final games to a more viewer-friendly (i.e., higher ratings) January 2nd date.

A representative for ESPN declined comment.

Public comment, anyway.