Today, in Baylor

Another day, another law su…

Aw, hell, I don’t have the stomach to blog about this crap anymore.   Just burn the place down, salt the earth and be done with it, okay?

Chicken soup for the Georgia football blogger’s soul

Somehow this one short quote from Pat Allen manages to push my learning curve button perfectly.

“Our eyes are up more and we’re able to understand defenses a lot better and that all goes to Coach Pitt,” said the 6-foot-4, 285-pound Allen said. “He really teaches us front, he teaches us rotations, those type of things. When we key in on those things, we’re able to make calls and adjust.”

Keep keying in, baby.  Keep keying in.

“You look at the map and obviously it makes sense.”

Continuing with the theme from the last post, is it time to acknowledge that Gus Malzahn wishes he didn’t have time for Alabama (at least until the SECCG)?

Now, THIS is what “really doesn’t have time for that shit” looks like.

Hugh Freeze, ladies and gentlemen.

https://twitter.com/patrickdeavours/status/864843386209144832

You’ve come a long way from telling folks to submit their concerns to the Ole Miss compliance office, baby.

“I’m a big fan of getting to know kids, and that’s difficult.”

I’m puzzled by a couple of things in this Ed Aschoff piece defending SEC coaches’ misgivings about the new signing period and related earlier visit dates.

First, if not having enough time to get to know recruits is now a legitimate concern, why haven’t we heard about this before in the context of junior college kids who have signed at the same in December for years now?  Other than the latter living away from momma for a year or two, what’s the difference?

Second, is Orgeron serious about this?

LSU’s Ed Orgeron went beyond just the recruit-coach relationship and mentioned the fact that a signing period in December is going to interrupt bowl preparation for the actual team fans watch and coaches coach. You think Alabama fans would be pleased with Saban and his staff hovering around a fax machine while simultaneously trying to run a practice leading up to the College Football Playoff semifinal?

Bowl prep conflicts, eh?  Substitute hovering over a fax machine for constantly working a cell phone texting recruits you have to stay on top of until February… from a time constraint standpoint, it’s hard to see any difference.  Christ, Kirby Smart was recruiting for Georgia while he was preparing for his last national title game at Alabama.  Somehow he managed both.  Are we really supposed to believe that these guys, with their substantial support staffs, can’t walk and chew gum at the same time?

I’m not being snarky here.  I honestly don’t get what the big deal is.  Anybody have an idea?

Just because they never had it so good may be true doesn’t make it right.

An alert reader passed on this tour de force defense of what currently passes for amateurism, suspecting I’d have a reaction.  Guess what?  He’s right.

It’s not the romance part that gets me.  As I’ve said before, been there, done that.  If somebody feels in their heart of hearts that players shouldn’t be compensated any more than they already are, more power to him or her.  I don’t mind a romantic — just one who finds it convenient to ignore anything you might learn in an Econ 101 class.

Take, for example the juxtaposition of “they’ve never had it so good” here…

The list of perks for being a football player at a big-time program is long and enviable. All the food you can eat. Lodging at what is typically the best dorm on campus. Enough team-issued gear — some recruits will turn spurn an adidas school in favor of a Nike school — to make for quite an extensive wardrobe.

… with, “hey, they’re just like any other college kid” here:

This isn’t to say that there aren’t hard times. Many of these families can’t afford to put money in their sons’ accounts.

It’s not unusual to hear stories about players going hungry on weekends because the cafeteria was closed. Scholarship players aren’t allowed to have jobs during the season, and there’s no time for one anyway.

You know who has similar problems? Pretty much every other student on campus — the ones who can’t run a 4.4 40 or bench press 400 pounds. Practically all college kids are broke. It’s a part of the experience. Find any successful graduate, and he can probably tell you about that month junior year when he lived off ramen noodles.

Which is it, then?  And why is any of that relevant in light of an argument — “80,000 fans fill Williams-Brice Stadium on Saturdays in the fall to watch football, not lab experiments.” — that even he concedes is legitimate?

Then there’s the ever-popular, arrogant “eh, if we paid the kids real money, they’d just blow it on video games and weed” argument.

They’re also getting stipends now, supposedly to pay for the cost-of-living expenses not typically covered by a full ride. Laundry money, grocery money, gas money — most of these kids are away from home for the first time. There’s no accounting procedure for that cash, though. Tattoo artists are no doubt grateful.

Yeah, it would be a real shame for them to spend a few of their bucks on tats.  It’s far wiser for the folks running the sport to take that money and spend it on Charlie Weis, Larry Scott and Lane Kiffin.  The beautiful thing there is denying the first opportunity is what enables the second.

Oh, let’s not discount the free will argument.  Nobody’s holding a gun to these kids’ heads, damn it!

If a young man dreams of making it to the NFL, this is the only path. No minor league. No European league. If he doesn’t agree with the college football model, well, nobody is forcing him to fax in that letter of intent.

These are the rules of engagement. A lot of people around them — not just the Sabans of the world — are making a lot of money, but let’s stop comparing college football players to Chinese factory workers. Their scholarships are only becoming more valuable, too. Tuition costs keep going higher. Swag bags keep getting bigger.

“These are the rules of engagement.”  Never mind that in the real world, rules are set in the market, while in the college athletic world, they’re imposed by a cartel that doesn’t allow its hired help to obtain counsel to understand those rules, let alone negotiate them.

(By the way, I note with some amusement that Crist has a sad over some schools’ athletic departments losing money.  Accepting for the sake of argument the validity of the bookkeeping behind that proposition, who’s forcing them to sign up for that?)

When you can argue — apparently with a straight face — that, at $11 million, Nick Saban is underpaid, but his players aren’t, I’d say you have a strange grasp of economics.

That you firmly believe in the aesthetics that the players get enough as it is as a moral judgment is an opinion with which I may disagree, but I won’t challenge your right to express it.  To dress it up with pseudo-economic rationales like silly references to minor-league baseball (is there a minor league set up to earn revenue like the Big Ten or SEC do?) or free clothes (remember, the schools get paid multi-millions by the clothing companies for those clothes), or the tired straw man plantation argument (“Some go so far as to say that they’re a step above slave labor.”), though, is nothing but a dodge.  The real issue we should be debating if we’re going to be honest about it is this:  would these kids be any worse off if the market determined the value of their services?

Or to put it another way, what’s the economic, as opposed to the emotional, justification for treating student-athletes differently from other students, or, for that matter, any other American seeking to market their skills?  If there’s something valid in treating these kids as wards in need of protection, then maybe there’s good reason for the way the NCAA controls their compensation.  But I suspect that people who go to the lengths John Crist does to construct a defense of the status quo know deep down inside that it’s just a lot of empty spin to justify their emotions about amateurism.

If you disagree, perhaps you can explain why, if the purity of the college amateur experience is sacrosanct to our enjoyment of the sport, people like Crist can sheepishly defend what exists now, instead of decrying it as a debasement of that ideal.  As the old saying goes, you can’t be a little pregnant.

This isn’t a debate I expect to win with some of you.  It’s just that I’d like to hear answers to some of these questions from those of you who think there’s something more to this debate than a mere emotional preference.

Because that’s the heart of Crist’s argument when he writes,

I’m not here to tell you that the NCAA operates a perfect system. Even suggesting that it’s fair to student-athletes can be a stretch. But I push back when critics whine that players are being exploited solely for the monetary gain of others.

If someone could make more in a free market setting than he’s allowed to make because a group colludes to limit his compensation and appropriates that difference to its own ends, how is that not exploitation?  I’ll hang up and listen to your answers now.

Today, in doing it for the kids

Hey, don’t let anyone think coaches aren’t concerned about their charges.  Why, just look at the reasons they favor allowing student-athletes to play in four games without busting their redshirts!

“It would actually enhance their development to some degree,” Saban said during the SEC coaches’ postspring teleconference. “With the numbers that we have right now and the number of games that we’re playing, you might be able to play a few more players in some of those games, and that would help some of the other players on your team, as well.

Gotta love that “to some degree” qualifier.  The real thing that gets enhanced is Saban’s ability to judge earlier whether the time has come to jettison a kid to open up a roster spot for the next five-star recruit.

Mullen also said it would benefit players who might start the season off slowly but gradually work their way into game shape. Instead of sitting them to preserve more eligibility, coaches would now opt to give them valuable experience to better their future development. This proposal could also help with players keep their redshirts if they don’t see action until later in the season but suffer season-ending injuries.

“You should be able to do that,” Mullen said. “I’m definitely in favor of that.”

No shit there, Sherlock.  If a coach wants it, one more year on the roster is never a bad thing.

No matter how these guys spin it, it always comes back to control.  They’re never going to have a problem with anything that helps strengthen that.

The SEC ain’t man enough to play nine conference games, PAWWWLLL.

Pat Dye thinks the conference is full of pussies because coaches won’t take on another conference opponent.

“If you can’t win three games in the conference playing nine games, you don’t deserve to go to a bowl game,” Dye said. “The other three games can be somebody you can beat, hopefully. If you can’t win three of those kind, if you’re in the Southeastern Conference, you don’t deserve to go.”

Whatever danger there was of more potential losses would be offset by ticket sales, Dye said. SEC teams typically play a patsy — often an FCS school — in their fourth non-conference game, which has led to plenty of no-shows in the stands.

“Your fans would love it,” Dye said. “They would much rather see you play an LSU or Tennessee or Florida or somebody in the Southeastern Conference than they had see you play Louisiana-Monroe. … If you played another conference game, it would increase the ticket sales. Nobody wants to come to those other four games. They just come because they’re in the habit of coming. You can talk about Auburn, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, LSU … they’ve all got empty seats in the stadium when they play those teams. They are sellouts because they sell all the season tickets.”

Pfft.  Fans.  Since when did they matter?

He’s right, but since they sell out the games anyway, what motivation do schools have for improving the schedule?