Believe me, I get this. I really do.
But when I read this, I wonder if there’s anything people with good intentions can do that’s really going to make enough of a difference. Because the people in charge certainly aren’t rushing forward to do it, and the people with money aren’t pushing them to do so.
I mean, start with Seth Emerson’s summary of the SEC’s week that was. And that’s just in a week. Add to that Brian Cook’s snark…
Let’s recap events in the SEC since Greg Sankey went on his smarm offensive about satellite camps:
Tennessee is hit with a Title IX lawsuit that alleges Baylor goings-on in Knoxville.
Alabamafires an assistant coach because of recruiting violations. Saban further bitches about NCAA drug testing policies, implying that someone got McGary’d.
Ole Miss is hit with a half-dozen Level 1 NCAA violations that don’t even include the revelation from Laremy Tunsil that he was paid by Ole Miss employees. Contrary to the lies Ole Miss fed various credulous reporters, most of the allegations concern Hugh Freeze’s tenure, not Houston Nutt’s.
Mississippi State enrolls a five-star recruit who was caught on tape beating a prone woman. They suspend him for the Southern Alabama game.
Texas A&M loses a quarterback commit, causing an assistant coach to go on a twitter rant that causes further decommits. This one is more dumb than troubling, but it’s really dumb.
… and that’s just one conference over the past few months. Also, let’s not forget the dumbassery consuming the Big 12 right now as it ineptly tries to maximize its revenue stream, or the way the Pac-12 managed to butcher itself with the debacle over the vote the conference cast.
The only reason Jim Delany isn’t in the discussion is because he’s kept his head down and mouth shut for a while. Perhaps he took enough heat for his “we’ll drop the Big Ten to Division III” nonsense to last him.
As I’ve said before, the people running college athletics are modern day Jed Clampetts — not particularly worldly folks who managed through sheer luck to find lots of oil on their property. The main difference between them and Jed is that Jed never felt that his luck made him any smarter.
The only way the people in charge of college sports are going to feel the heat is if there’s a major disruption to the cash flow that can be traced to our disgust. If you think the idea of a fan strike is a legitimate possibility, could you let the folks at ThankKenStarr.com know? Just asking for a friend.
Get The Picture 
Luckily I am sure whoever these people with good intentions are they will have a soap box.
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Jed Clampett analogy is probably the most spot on thing I’ve read in a while–especially the difference between him and those running college athletics. Just spot on.
That being said, man, I am ready to just look at football clips and start talking strategy and players. Man, this stuff is taxing.
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Actually, Jed Clampett was the only smart one in Beverly Hills. He just sat back and laughed as everyone else made fools and jackasses of themselves.
Don’t slander Jed by comparing him to Bowlsby and Delany.
Jethro could even cypher better than either of their conferences, as ten does not rise to 12 and 14 is B1Gger than ten.
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+++++1
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I agree with the Clampett analogy. Can I get permission from the Senator to borrow it?! The SEC and college football happened upon a treasure and its value has little to no basis in anything they’ve done.
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As Jed would say “pitiful, just pitiful”- spot on Senator.
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Take it back? Sure. Why not. Lead the way along with other journalists and tell us how we may participate.
UGA has pride in it’s past player actions lead by Richt. B-M got rid of Richt after listening to the off-note voices (as mentioned here) speak up concerning “wins”. The edge of this smoky fire is looking at the conflagration that can ensue from the promise of 93k fans who have been interpreted as saying “Yes” to more “wins” at our school and to (for the present) proceed accordingly. Anyone and all who have message listeners among their blog followers should carry the opposing message forward now, if serious.
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“past player disciplinary actions…..”
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Great post, I too struggle to see a way to solve these problems. Specifically because doing the right thing with regards to crime committed by players usually runs contrary to the financial interests of the school. MSU is a clear example, the school can give lip service, but they are not about to bench or expel a 5 star recruit. Something has to change though, and it might require penalties to schools (financial and post-season) being handed down from on high by the NCAA office. Although knowing how incompetent the NCAA is I don’t know how that would work either.
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I think the point here is that it should be lead from the bottom up (the fans) and the baton passed directly to SEC powers. Sankey’s voice and actions should be leading us down the path to “fixing” what any idiot can see is coming down the tube from attitudes of many SEC schools who worship “wins” above all else in this game.
Wrong fucking message is sent by tolerating even a little of this, but what Bluto and others are pointing out, the dam is cracking and you can’t stop the deluge that comes next.
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It probably starts with men considering that raping women isnt alright anymore. That punching defenseless women isnt alright anymore. Until men accept those 2 things personally and within their social circles, it isnt going to change.
But even on these message boards you have people who immediately jump to well but what if scenarios. Those people enable the abusers to continue to abuse. They provide the path for it to be ignored.
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I don’t think the problem is with people thinking rape and violence are “alright”. You could poll every football fan in the country and I don’t think a single person would say that rape or any sexual assault was acceptable under any circumstances. The big issue as I see it is the thing that governs the whole world…Money. Right now, the amount of money a school would lose from expelling their 5 star QB far outweighs the consequences of trying to sweep a heinous crime they commit under the rug. I’m extremely happy to see things changing due to the media exposure, but I believe we’ll really see a difference when the penalty for a team’s player committing sexual assault or felony violence starts to outweigh the possible benefits of having that talented player on the field. Imagine if a team became ineligible for the playoffs that year if even one of their players was found guilty of these things, along with a 5 year playoff ban and scholarship reductions for the same amount of time if any effort to conceal it was discovered. Schools would start looking at the character of players and coaches much more critically, and players would get the message that supreme talent is no longer enough to excuse atrocious behavior.
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They just move the bars as to what “rape” is. You hear lots of “she wanted it”, “she shouldn’t have drank so much”, “boys will be boys”, and every other lame excuse for sexual assault. Not sure how you can survey the current landscape of sexual assaults in this country and determine that men take rape and sexual assault seriously in this country. We are seeing sexual assault scandals everywhere right now and it aint all because of money.
Honestly, what money do you think MSU is looking at to balance out what this kid did to that female? How much do you think it is over the next 3-4 years? Maybe MSU makes a slightly better bowl game 1 of those years? Maybe an 8-5 season sees a slight uptick in donations? Seriously what windfall awaits MSU for bringing this guy onto campus? They still cash their SEC checks, I am sure they would still sell their season tickets, cowbells would still fly of the shelves.
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Good points to be sure, last thing I’ll add is that we are seeing so many sexual assault scandals because people are taking it seriously. This kind of stuff happened just as much, and probably more in the past; but victims were never given the time of day, or even sometimes openly attacked. We wouldn’t hear as much about these scandals if they weren’t being taken seriously.
In the case of MSU i would pose the question about what have they lost by keeping him on? Sure they are getting plenty of bad press now, but the news cycle will move on to something else and this incident will be forgotten by most people. MSU will keep their 5 star player after giving their lip service and continue to have a better shot at winning games. They’ve suffered no fines or post season sanctions and as a result, it’s still in the school’s interest to keep him with the program. (From a purely strategic perspective, not moral obviously).
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Yeah you can’t really use the widespread sexual assault cover up scandals as evidence of men caring more about sexual assault now. Especially considering most of the time it is the women who have been abused who are the ones making the most noise about the situation.
If there was no video or police report on this incident he doesnt even get a suspension. MSU certainly wouldn’t be talking about it. But there is a video and everyone saw it and you still have people making excuses for him, MSU, and men hitting women in general. People on this very message board.
There are still lots of men that don’t care about any level of violence towards women, they view women as lesser so they can easily ignore it.
It’s gross and awful and people like you aren’t helping the situation.
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I completely disagree with the Richt analogy. It’s perfectly possible to have a decent set of morals regarding program integrity and player discipline AND go all out with the recruiting, and detail managing necessary to be a championship program. Richt isn’t the only coach who is a decent man, and just because CKS’s entire identity isn’t about being a nice guy doesn’t mean he isn’t. There have been absolutely no indications that CKS is immoral, so please stop acting like we threw away Richt for some evil mercenary and flushed the program’s integrity down the toilet.
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You are looking at Richt championships and that ain’t the subject. The subject is more toward not being like the cheaters and those conflicted by the “win” versus “character building”.
Do you see the “Alabama way” as being on that side of the keel? Look again and see whether we are encouraging Smart to be like the coach of Bama or to be our UGA Coach by tolerating the Taylor recruitment and having a coach you have to dismiss because he sees another type of baton handed off in this race for SEC supremacy? And I’m not picking on Saban because there are plenty of others choosing the same path. That’s what has to be stopped.
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Btw, I don’t agree with your inflammatory words of “evil mercenary” and sarcastic “integrity”. Kirby is an alumni of our school and is above reproach for what he has done thus far (except piss off the press with the 90 day info-sharing period). I want him to continue down that path instead of signaling that he is open to the ways coaches are holding onto and playing football players who should be held accountable for acts that go against the principles of sport.
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“…alumnus…”, but what the hell.
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Are you suggesting he was not involved in recruiting Taylor, a defensive player……..that was an ominous sign to me…………
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Not at all. I’m very sure that as soon as Taylor came onto the field at Bama, Kirby asked,”Who is that new big player with the scratches on his face?”.
“….thus far…” implies UGA, where he starts with a clean slate; however, I don’t want the hint of earlier slime marks entertwined after he and/or B-M get the wrong signal sent by 93k plus that was one of ” We are loyal and want to help recruiting” that becomes perverted into “Win – at any cost”
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Mr. Cojones,
I’m afraid you don’t get a clean slate just because you changed schools. Pursuing a guy who beat his girlfriend is absolutely pitiful. Now, if Kirby was totally uninvolved(Which we will never know and which I’d never believe) it would be different. Of course I’ve already purchased my season’s tickets, went to G-day and promised to support my school, though I cut my donation significantly. So, I guess I’m already a bit hypocritical. One more instance though will likely put me over the edge.
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Spot on, Mr. Crowell.
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“…a decent set of morals regarding program integrity…”
Agree with your post. IMHO it appears CKS is outdoing CMR in regard to work ethic. And isn’t work ethic a major measure of one’s integrity? So far, there’s little to indicate CKS is lax with discipline.
Getting off subject I guess, but it seems to me CMR’s morality is/was inconsistent. For example, there appears to be no moral dilemma when it comes to continuing to collect millions on a contract he didn’t deem fit to sign, for coaching work he no longer performs for UGA. Oh, but that’s business – and integrity and morality don’t matter?
When it came to player discipline, CMR stood idly by while TG3’s constitutional rights were trampled. And how is it morally acceptable to be silent about Dareus receiving a 1 game suspension, while A.J. Green gets a multi-game suspension for a lesser infraction? I don’t buy into the idea that excessive internal discipline, and not defending our own players in unjust circumstances, equates to high morals.
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but Ivan Maisel thinks things are improving!
am w Tim Tucker on this…Kirby is gonna fall on the Mullen side on the continuum if Mullen and Richt are the polarities. and if that happens, shame on us.
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And you know this exactly how?
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sugarbritches, i don’t know. i fear it will happen. but a very charming indignity on your part.
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That was a great answer…. you are an idiot.
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And by the way ,YOU said Kirby would fall on the Mullen side.
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Some steps I am in favor of:
(1) tell our congressmen we want to break up the NFL’s special exemption status, allowing competitive space for football farm and exhibition leagues to get the athletes who do not want to be in school out of school
(2) vote out city and state officials who pay for NFL stadiums, also making it more competitive for startup leagues
(3) lobby to make no allowances for athletes in the admissions process – if you can clear admissions, we give you a scholarship – not before
(4) lobby to allow student athletes the same freedom to sign autographs, work at a car dealership, write books, etc as other students
(5) stop the NCAA from setting up rules about when and how athletes can transfer. You get into a school, you may play athletics there, and they may offer you a scholarship.
Like so very, very many entangled problems in our society, this issue comes down to govt granting special favors to certain types of people and restricting the freedom of others.
People are using govt force and money to manipulate markets and to turn others’ freedom and money to their own advantage. But instead of fixing the root issues we’re wasting energy looking for workarounds (ie paying athletes – but how much? which athletes? who pays?) that only add extra layers of competition w/o adding any efficiency or fairness.
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Hey Cosmo, what a great post that would no doubt be positive changes.
One big issue I see is this; leaving it up to the ncaa to police the policies. I can easily see that Alabama would be one of a half dozen schools that would maintain its current roster quality even though your list of changes are in effect. The end result would be 1,2, or maybe 5 schools that would be at a huge talent advantage over everyone else, which would result in laughable parity issues. They would naturally try to force parity, and we’d be right back where we are now.
It’s like nascar. They “fixed” nascar by making all the cars the same. Now it sucks.
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black kids have ruined all of college sports, don’t kid yourself or lie to yourself. you want sports to come back? get rid of these thugs they have no respect for the love of the game…
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Not “black kids” just have the athletes have the same entrance requirements as any other student.
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You can peddle that racist trash at some other blog or message board, pal.
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I remember the old man barber downtown in about 85. He told me he didn’t mind football because he couldn’t “see them” but really hated basketball. Wonder what he thought of Ali?
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You seem to have no respect for basic, 1st grade level punctuation and grammar.
By the way, Johnny Manziel, Marshall Henderson, and Zach Mettenberger all say hi.
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Senator, you have done yo’ duty by sounding our own UGA warning bell while helping expose the hypocrisy underneath separate sets of law interpretation standards commensurate with an individual’s importance to playing football for his Coach to maintain his job; for his school to maintain mo’ money; for his conference to maintain jobs and mo’ money.
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Everyone with a sister, a daughter, an aunt, a mother – everyone should be involved in changing what now is high profile in college football/athletics and that can, with inattention and inaction, become mundane.
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How long did it take the B1G to forget it’s problems? In Brian’s case, about 12 months, apparently. Child rape, players in the hospital over workouts, QBs teetering around the field. Oh well, let’s mock the SEC and deify Harbaugh.
Aka: reset button. CFB has an infinite supply.
Remember Lawrence Phillips? Or any of the other scandals that CFB deals with annually?
No one really cares for more than 5 min until the scandal lands on your school.
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Well, Illinois fired the coach and AD. What else did you expect?
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Didn’t mention Illinois. Or Tatoo-gate. My point is not that the B1G is worse, just that to even a jaded commenter like BC, all it takes to suspend the angst is “Harbaugh!” or something similar.
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Beckman got fired for making players practice and play hurt so I figured “players in the hospital over workouts,” was about them. My bad.
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Iowa
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“The only way the people running college sports are going to feel the heat is if there’s a major disruption to the cash flow that can be traced to our disgust.”
I hate to be depressing, but this is a problem that is way past fixing in a way that won’t destroy the college game as we know it. There may have been a chance, up until about 2000, to turn the ship around, but we are in the current now.
It’s not just about revenue. At this point, all the big schools have borrowed to over-invested in capital improvements and coaching salaries. Debt service is the beast that must be fed. UGA is in better shape than most (at least for now), but when things start to fall apart, it will be a dumpster fire.
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Well, the more I think on it, the bigger the problem becomes.
Throughout history how has society/general public been kept in check in terms of decency, morality, and law? Seems to me it’s been driven by the bible, royalty/monarchy/dictatorship, or us with the “rule of law”. On the surface we claim the rule of law. In reality though, we are a society built on media. Television is our measure by which behavior is checked when there’s no authority around. “How you carry yourself when no one is looking” is the bottom line here, and this line is ideally drawn from our laws, but the reality is this line is drawn by what we see going on in the entertainment available to us. Kids, especially in poverty, grow up wanting to be someone else, parents parent like they are someone else, and this is what we get.
There was a time when people would carry themselves with honor and pride when nobody was looking. Now, it is mostly “nobody is looking so I can get away with it”. Add in the entitlement that breeds “I did the right thing, where’s my award” and we see even more clearly how our society is twirling in a viscous circle,
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“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.” Said by a man born in 1878.
This shit has always been happening, but now cameras, a digital publishing platform, and a real-time, universal distribution system have completely reshaped what we can see.
I’m not romanticizing the past. The only thing that has changed is that it’s a hell of a lot harder to cover things up today. So instead you hire people like Spaeth to try to spin it as best you can.
Ken Starr, Art Briles, Joe Paterno, and Graham Spanier were all reared in those “halcyon” days when “character was king.” And would all still be held up as icons of that age if a combination of determined victims and a really kick-ass information-sharing system hadn’t revealed them for the self-serving bullies/enablers that a fat paycheck turned them into.
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BTW, ThankKenStarr.com is a joke, and you can’t even make comments. All you can do is add your name to the ass-kissing.
However ThanksKenStarr.com (note the s after thank) IS available as a domain. Anyone want to buy it and put a true comment page on there so we can all thank Ken Starr for helping to ruin the college life of ~12 coeds and push college football deeper into the trash heap it has become? Someone please buy it and set up a page.
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I’d be willing to donate to that cause because I’m certain that number is probably higher.
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