“What I can say to our fans is to first, look at our teams.”

Jere Morehead’s advice isn’t aging well.  And it’s only May.

No pressure, Kirby.

Nick Saban is “crazy” about something he has control over.

The Sabanator goes all “cats and dogs, living together” over the new recruiting rules.

“I’m at a loss with the direction that we’re moving in relative to the rules that we’re making. I hate to speak in a negative way about colleagues or people that are responsible for passing some of this stuff.

“I don’t see how it helps anything or anybody. Football is a developmental game. To keep trying to push a recruiting calendar, it’s for the benefit of teams in the North because they want guys to visit in the summertime and all that …

“If character and intelligence and things we’re responsible for … how do we evaluate that stuff if we’re offering guys when they’re sophomores, so they can visit in their junior year, so they can decide before their senior year?”

“That means a high school coach is going to be in the same position we are now with [Leonard] Fournette and [Christian] McCaffrey. They don’t play in their bowl games. What’s to say some high school kid says, ‘We’re out of the playoffs, I’m not going to play anymore this year. I’m going to Alabama.’

First of all, spare me the crocodile tears about evaluating character.  Coming from the guy who signed Jonathan Taylor without doing a lick of due diligence, that’s nothing but absurd bullshit.  When it comes to early signing, the evaluation he’s concerned about is playing ability, nothing more, nothing less.

Even more absurd than that, though, is the suggestion of a helpless Nick Saban facing the possibility of a kid saying “screw high school, Roll Tide”.  Assuming for the sake of argument that ever becomes a real thing, if Nick wants to nip that kind of thinking in the bud, all he has to do is say he’ll yank the offer of the first recruit who pulls that stunt.  It’s a completely nonexistent threat to Saban.

The thought that he might lose one late bloomer to a mid-major program via an early signing period is really eating at the man.

Advertisement

Better call Huntley.

It’s a good thing Antonio Callaway already has the number on his speed dial.

Mark Emmert, Penn State and reaping what you sow

Andy Staples asks a pertinent question.

Every time something new surfaces in the Baylor scandal, a question follows. Where is the NCAA? Another question typically follows that one. When is Baylor getting the death penalty?

The answer shouldn’t surprise anyone.  (At least it doesn’t surprise me.)

This explanation will prompt another question. But what about Penn State? The answer is NCAA president Mark Emmert screwed up with Penn State in 2012. Led by Emmert, the NCAA sidestepped its normal disciplinary process to hammer Penn State’s football program with sanctions following the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Emmert caved to public outcry without considering whether his organization’s own rules even allowed the punishment. Spoiler alert: They probably didn’t. After Pennsylvania’s treasurer and representatives of Joe Paterno’s estate sued, the NCAA wound up walking back the penalties, and the organization was further embarrassed when Oregon State president Ed Ray, the chair of the committee that issued the penalties, admitted he couldn’t even be bothered to read the Freeh Report, the investigation upon which the sanctions were based, while on vacation.

So that’s why the NCAA won’t hammer the Baylor football program for acts far more heinous than people (allegedly) giving people money for being good at football at Ole Miss or people (allegedly) creating fake classes so some athletes could keep playing sports at North Carolina. The NCAA, an organization made up of universities with rules made by the universities, is not equipped to handle things that matter far more than the trifles it typically polices.

Which brings us to the most important question: Why isn’t it?

Because the schools are only so moronic.

The schools, which once banned cream cheese for bagels, had a chance after the Penn State debacle to alter the NCAA’s rules to allow the organization to take on more serious matters. They could have added language to their Unethical Conduct bylaw—their catch-all rule—that would have made athletic department employees who failed to report an allegation of violence (sexual or otherwise) against another person by anyone under their purview guilty of a violation. The schools could have added language that any program that benefitted from such a cover-up can be hit with further sanctions. Such changes, which could have been made within a year or two of the Penn State mistake, might have allowed for NCAA sanctions in the Baylor case* depending on the timeline.

*The NCAA could conceivably punish Baylor for violations of recruiting or extra benefit rules. There certainly were plenty of accusations on those fronts during the Briles era, but nothing has been proven at this point. When one Baylor basketball player murdered another in 2003 and coach Dave Bliss told his players to lie about the dead player, the NCAA did punish the program. Not for the truly awful stuff, but because Bliss was paying two players—including murder victim Patrick Dennehy—to act as walk-ons to get around NCAA scholarship limits.

But the leaders of the schools chose not to give the NCAA that power. Why? Perhaps they didn’t want the NCAA’s occasionally inept enforcement department messing around in cases far more important in the grand scheme than whether a coach made too many phone calls to a recruit. Perhaps they felt the existing state and federal laws were enough. Perhaps they feared the next scandal would pop up at their school and didn’t want to give the NCAA the option to gut a cash cow football program.

Or perhaps they didn’t want to give Mark Emmert a new framework from which to overstep his boundaries.

I warned at the time that Emmert was engaged in a disastrous ends justify the means mindset, and that ignoring established guidelines because it felt good in the moment would eventually come back to bite him and the NCAA in the ass.  Well, here we are.

As a bastion of moral superiority, the NCAA looks bad in hindsight in its dealings with Penn State and looks bad with its present inaction regarding Baylor.  Well played, Mark.

When stats aren’t convincing

Interesting assertion from the AJ-C’s Brandon Adams yesterday:

Georgia football podcast: One stat could determine SEC East winner

Beginning of the show: In three of the last four seasons the winner of the SEC East has collected more than 40 sacks as a team.

Now that’s true, as far as it goes.  Missouri cracked the 40-sack mark in 2013 and 2014, while Florida did the same in 2015.  However, the Gators, while leading the East in sacks last season, only managed 31 on the way to winning the division.  So, maybe the key is simply topping the division rather than a specific number.

Except when you go back to 2012, you find Georgia’s 32 sacks were only second-best in the East, behind South Carolina’s 43 (I think some dude named Clowney was a Gamecock back then).

There really isn’t much of a rhyme or reason to this, then.  Which shouldn’t come as a surprise when you think about how chaotic the division has been, in the sense that the favorite never seems to win it these days.  In fact, scrounging around the cfbstats.com site, I couldn’t find a single statistical category over the past four seasons that the East winner topped in all years.

None of which is to say I wouldn’t love for the Dawgs to manage forty-plus sacks.  I would venture to say were that to happen, it would be an indication that the defense enjoyed a dominant 2017.  But as far as that guaranteeing a trip to Atlanta in December, who knows?